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    Morning After: Poetry and Prose in a Post-Truth World
    Morning After: Poetry and Prose in a Post-Truth World
    Morning After: Poetry and Prose in a Post-Truth World
    Ebook154 pages1 hour

    Morning After: Poetry and Prose in a Post-Truth World

    By Margaret Randall

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    About this ebook

    The Morning After is Margaret Randall's 30th poetry collection and eleventh with Wings Press. The title poem was written, as so many in this country were, the morning after the November 8, 2016 presidential election: "I wish there was a pill for that," is one of its lines. But Randall doesn't stay with anger, irony, or a pamphleteering voice. Her work goes much deeper, grappling with ageless concerns and unexpected details. Throughout this volume there is a concern with time, place, and memory; intimate landscape; mature love; the current threat to the richness of language; global consciousness; a mapping of human questioning and exploration of identity. In these pages the reader will find George Zimmerman's gun, a herd of buffalo at Standing Rock, rebar, the Super Moon, "reptile dysfunction," and multiple choice vs. Socratic wisdom. Reflecting Randall's recent work with translation, several poems take on that practice in its broadest sense. Stylistically, for the first time in half a century she has gone back to her modus of the 1960s and mixed story and prosody with poetry; only now the result is more sophisticated and much harder hitting. The title poem of The Morning After first appeared in two anthologies of poetry responding to the January 2017 presidential inauguration: Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and Truth to Power; and in Spanish translation in Revista Casa de las Amricas, Havana, Cuba. The Morning After contains powerful poems of witness as well as personal poems, both of which soar through "limitless rooms, unfenced spaces / where our thoughts may procreate / before they change direction," as well as autobiographical prose pieces (that read like prose poems), recounting a life of resistance, the life of a life-long literary and political revolutionary. If ever there were a time for the words of Margaret Randall, it is now. Read this book. Howl this book!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWings Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2017
    ISBN9781609405410
    Morning After: Poetry and Prose in a Post-Truth World
    Author

    Margaret Randall

    Writer and social activist Margaret Randall is the author of more than eighty published books, including To Change the World: My Years in Cuba (2009) and, most recently, As If the Empty Chair / Como si la silla vaca (a bilingual book of poetry) and First Laugh (essays). She lives in Albuquerque.

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      Book preview

      Morning After - Margaret Randall

      Hologram

      The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.

      —William James

      A flash of light. Not white. Nor black. Colorless as outer space and raging as those fiery lava spills fleeing their own terror, running and then coagulating and weaving themselves into ropes of new land, balanced above the depths.

      Caught between centuries, interstices of time, rivulets of memory and energies that speed and slow as if their talents for sustaining whole belief systems depend upon a precise set of words or acts, this place has made itself scarce. Does it want to be found? Does it want me to find it, get to know its doubts, misgivings, egregious failures?

      Some mornings I wake to its palm-studded beaches and distant mountain silhouette. Empty of beings. Then there are evenings, just before sleep, when crowds fill my eyes, all looking in the same direction, listening to the same voice. I cannot make out its coastline for the multitudes.

      My questions are always some version of these: Where does imagined time meet experiential time? Where does the border of imagined space sidle up to the borders of those places we have been, and how do these borders come together, knit themselves around our cells, take up residence in corporeal memory?

      Cosmologist Stephen Hawking tells us time travel is possible in one direction only. Forward. We cannot go back. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity shows us how more or less gravity makes it possible for us to travel through space and then return to a time that is days (or years or generations) after the moment of departure. We would have gone out and come back having altered our relationship to what we left behind.

      Imagine going on a space flight, visiting a distant planet, and returning to earth. The people we loved have aged, died, and their descendants aged and died—so that you, the traveler, have been away for a few years at most, while generations have passed on earth. According to this same scientific assumption (law?), it is not possible for us to visit an earlier moment in history. That is the stuff of science fiction—fiction after all.

      As a child I had trouble with corners, never knowing exactly where the dividing line was or how it spoke to me. Just as it was difficult for me then to understand how red and green traffic lights allowed both cars and those of us on foot to move in a well-controlled dance—I asked my father repeatedly, until his explanation suddenly clicked into my ability to comprehend his words—, I haven’t been able to totally follow Hawking’s logic; its fuzzy edges tease my readiness, leak elusive questions that scatter certainties and promises in equal measure.

      Once I glimpsed the lines of a ruined citadel: a tall arch with blocks of stone fallen at its base. Then I fixated on a small yellow flower, growing from the rubble. Its delicate petals filled my frame, eliminating every surround. Voices silenced: a choreography of wordless mouths, moving. These two moments happened in the same place at the same time. I can no longer remember which I noticed first or how that which I saw later bore the imprint of my earlier gaze.

      My shy place is so small it fits in the hollow of one hand, threatens to slip between my fingers. But it may grow without warning, engulfing me in its size, flattening me against a wall of my own construction, a wall of questions pushing me away from myself. The hologram and I spar with one another. When things begin to get serious, one of us loosens her grip and laughs. It’s usually but not always the hologram.

      As I age, time acquires unexpected properties. It may drag itself out or move to condense more quickly. I have become suspicious of its loyalty. This has nothing to do with patience, but requires something like patience to inhabit it with grace.

      Age, implacable, is no hologram. Or is it? Experiencing its march is like opening a book whose pages remain uncut. Text mocks or reassures from within a secret cave. Wonder tinges its mouth.

      I close my eyes. Form and content settle into a miniature space. I open them and the map expands, lifts, flies.

      Will my hidden place’s colors always be this bright?

      Can I count on intuition, tradition, bread-crumbs, scent?

      Would I even be wondering about something this insistent if it didn’t exist?

      I gather myself slowly, draw a hot bath, brush my teeth making sure to dedicate two full minutes to the task, equally divided between quadrants. Mottled skin offers dark spots of age and flaccid hanging folds. Eyes squint in unconvinced recognition. I lay clean clothes out: the old Levis and black sweater. Bare feet have always carried me from here to there, flat shoes if I must leave the house or navigate rough terrain.

      Promises replace themselves in rapid succession. From sample size to much too large to swallow. From vast to intimate.

      Color always speaks first, carrying me on its wings.

      These days I think before releasing the words.

      No interruptions allowed.

      A man, any man, proclaims himself righteous. Or others agree and kneel. The perfect scenario for business. Greed and profit always at the ready. Followers arrive, just a few at first, then millions. Great temples are built in the man’s honor, surrounded by hovels where the faithful also turn their eyes toward the man and his convincing lies. Demands score a win at every level. Look up and bow down. A promise of other worlds. Money flows in a single direction, and power radiates from its pinnacle like lava exploding from the volcano’s throat.

      I stare up at the Golden Ratio, its proportion towering in graceful balance above the Parthenon’s nearest column. At Petra I catch another glimpse. At Angkor Wat, a masturbating monkey crowds me as I rest upon a low wall; he too is tired, lazy in the afternoon heat. At the library/brothel of Ephesus the same monkey mysteriously appears once more. We become friends. The wooden planks and palm thatch of a humble bohío in Cuba’s Pinar del Río make their best efforts to stand alongside such majestic marble and sandstone. Pride enables its success.

      But radiance is in the eye of the beholder.

      The half-standing walls of the Triumvirato sugar mill, signal the place where Carlota wanted freedom enough to risk her life. Eighteen forty-three. Nineteen seventy-five. One hundred thirty-two years separate that failed slave rebellion from the operation named for her—Carlota—when Cubans returned to Africa in a gesture meant to make amends for their ancestors’ sins. The act collapses time, gives it wings, at some unexpected moment reverses the terrifying history.

      We might call this a Day of Atonement. But most humans have found it easier to stage ritual than embody risk. At best, Truth and Reconciliation commissions, where survivors may bear witness, sometimes look their victimizers in the eye, ask for a justice that cannot erase their memory’s horror or bring back their dead. They provide the narrowest of pathways, upon which decompression may occur. Like the woven line extending to the edge of a Navajo rug, through which the rug’s spirit may wander free. Our great religions promise a better life after death. The belief itself suffers from its inability to grasp the teachings of Einstein, Hawking or that which

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