I'd like to end with a poem.
It's the one that Julie quoted from,
its beginning and end, which is really nice, because now it
becomes a reprise.
And we are very much--
we have an affinity here.
We're on the same track.
Well, it's not a track.
What is it?
Shelley famously said that poets are
the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
I don't think so, but what I do think
is that poets are the translators
of the unacknowledged world.
And that world as it becomes visible
is a reflection on the world we live in.
And it's seen as it so often is, through a daze of denial.
Probably the best thing you can say about poets
is that we're unpopular with fascists.
One of the initiating events of the tragic Spanish Civil War,
and that was the war that announced in victory, alas,
then announced the rise of fascism in Europe,
that initiating event was the murder of the great Andalusian
poet Federico García Lorca.
So this poem is an homage to him.
I should tell you that he was killed--
this was 1936, by the Francoistas, who
are the followers of Franco.
Their war cry was Viva La Muerte, Long live death.
You know, men are seldom so honest about their objectives.
That was the war-- the next year,
the event that Picasso memorialized,
the bombing of Guernica, which was the first mass
bombing of a civilian population of a city, which
has become regular behavior normalized, right?
And changed war forever, and made from then on civilians
the main target of it 90% now.
I thought of this-- it's called Up Against It, when
Becka put me up against the wall to take a picture today.
I was like, oh no.
The wall was white.
Whitewashed lime that shines in the sun until white
is pure pain, searing the eyes.
And the world was marked, pocked by a spray of black holes,
like nothing so much as the dots in a child's puzzle,
waiting for a line to make sense of them.
To pull from a scatter of points of familiar shape.
At the beginning of the bad time we
have come to think of as usual, they
stood a man here against this wall,
simply because of what he was.
Something that made it hard to do what they wanted.
So they thought that if they killed him first,
at the very beginning, the rest would come easy.
His blood like a red door opening
into the future in which the gypsy wind, capricious, always
eluding them, would be stilled.
Tied in a sack.
And the every day, which wore them down into grit
under its heels, would disappear into clouds of power.
Their boots would be real leather.
The rawhide smell from what they had taken
and hadn't the time to cure.
And if he were Lorca.
García Lorca, the writer with a fire in his hands, and he was,
and if they stood him up against this wall in its white that
defeated the light, throwing it back like a knife
into the eyes.
And if in that moment, as they raised their guns,
he remembered a dream he had dreamed but a month before.
A dream of a land surrounded and butchered by shepherds.
If all this were true, and it is,
then we approached this wall at our cost,
counting its black holes like the shrunken
emblems of the cosmos eating back its own matter.
And what then?
Shall we paste up the placards of a revolution in which we
no longer believe?
Shall we tear down the wall, knowing
another stands behind it, and another, and another
to the horizon of counting?
Shall we line up the children beside it,
pointing at each hole as a lesson
through which like a sieve, their hope will
begin to drain out?
Or shall we plant flowering vines
along the wall to cover the record?
And when each tendril, each slow, wavering filament,
each unruly winding line of green
is swaying along the wall, looking for somewhere
to anchor its urge to go on growing.
Verde, te quiero verde.
What then?
Why by then, in the long twilights,
in the hard work of planting and watering,
of watching and waiting, by then we
may have understood what we can't now imagine.
Desperate as we are about the white wall,
the holes in the shape of a man, the mark
they wanted to leave us.
The line that fear taught us to trace.
So different from the one that he left.
The one whose shaped left its trace
in the heart, the balcony open, the lungs spill of stars
in the sky.
The track of creations, milky tongue, and listen.
The shift and seethe of the sap, forcing its slow way
toward the branching twigs, the ear-splitting crack as the end
is riven by budding assault breeze in the orchard.
The small leaves trembling with light.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]