Go Back Where You Came From
by DANIEL MARLIN
In March 2012, Shaima Alwadi,
a 3- year-old Iraqi immigrant
to El Cajon, California received an anonymous note
which read, “go back to your own country…”
A week later she was found murdered on her
living room floor.
Let’s say you took your own advice,
and went back
where you came from,
to the tubercular slums of Glasgow
a hundred and fifty years ago,
or the peat farms of starving Galway.
Or to Moledetchna,
where Jewish boys
changed their names to dodge
twenty year hitches
in the Czar’s infantry,
or to Reggio Calabria
when landowners
had their way with peasant girls,
as they worked their parents
into dry furrows.
Try going back, not as a tourist
with credit card, but clueless,
in the humble shawls
your forebears wore
gathering lice in steerage,
before they poured off the docks,
to have the long syllables of their names
lopped off by an Immigration officer
checking for signs of palsy,
scanning his list of anarchists.
Sail backward,
past ports of departure,
through centuries as soldiers
hiding your religion
or killing for it,
as wet nurses,
unable to feed your own.
Back through the winters of the Rhineland,
Bohemia, Piemonte,
along trails of forgotten migration,
down the millennial ladder
to ancient African valleys
where your great mothers
learned to walk upright.
–But don’t stop there.
Forage with pointed snout
for grubs among ferns,
beneath the shadows of pterodactyls,
re-enter the primal ocean,
before our fins became toes,
and our lungs began
their subtle duty.
Become again
the one-celled flares of life
we were,
and continue—
into elemental stardust,
the whirlwind of the black
invisible hand.
Instructions, if the Prisoner Insists
by DANIEL MARLIN
If the prisoner mourns
the absence of wind and poppies
around her,
remind how these gray walls
keep the ragged streets
from her throat.
If, grown old,
she insists on her privacy,
explain that dry river grass
has nothing to hide
from silver water.
If she tries
to take her life,
stay her hand –
it is no longer hers,
but ours to end or allow.
If the prisoner keens
for her lost son
at midnight,
repeating that old
lie of her innocence,
warn her that
the Lord undoes deception.
If she complains of
the light bulb
which never dims, say,
here, for a while,
you are safe from eternal night.
Nagasaki 2010
by DANIEL MARLIN
Rust drips from window corners.
Fingers of moisture
stain white paper screens.
Doors bear the scars of age-
but they stand.
Shadows come and go
as clouds part and assemble,
objects move,
the sun completes its arc-
but no human shadow remains
etched into the wall
by the flash.
There are secrets and frustrations here,
mistakes and delays,
yet time remains in the city,
to understand and repair.
Cicada, rising with the August dawn,
stoke a metallic roar.
It does not foretell
a cyclone of fire.
In summer thirst
no desperate,
final begging
for water.
It rains sometimes,
untouched by cinders,
transparent drops.
Daniel Marlin lives in Berkeley, California, where he vigils against the University of California’s management of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Laboratories at Livermore CA., and Los Alamos, NM. He is the author of Heart of Ardor, the Paintings of Daniel Marlin, Isaiah at the Wall, Palestine Poems, and Amagasaki Sketchbook, a journal of art and writing based on a decade’s residence in Amagasaki City, Japan. He can be reached at dandotdan@yahoo.com.
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