WEBVTT

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I'd like to end with a poem.

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It's the one that
Julie quoted from,

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its beginning and end, which
is really nice, because now it

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becomes a reprise.

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And we are very much--

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we have an affinity here.

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We're on the same track.

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Well, it's not a track.

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What is it?

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Shelley famously
said that poets are

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the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.

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I don't think so,
but what I do think

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is that poets are
the translators

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of the unacknowledged world.

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And that world as
it becomes visible

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is a reflection on
the world we live in.

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And it's seen as it so often
is, through a daze of denial.

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Probably the best thing
you can say about poets

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is that we're unpopular
with fascists.

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One of the initiating events of
the tragic Spanish Civil War,

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and that was the war that
announced in victory, alas,

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then announced the rise
of fascism in Europe,

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that initiating event was the
murder of the great Andalusian

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poet Federico García Lorca.

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So this poem is
an homage to him.

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I should tell you
that he was killed--

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this was 1936, by
the Francoistas, who

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are the followers of Franco.

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Their war cry was Viva La
Muerte, Long live death.

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You know, men are seldom so
honest about their objectives.

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That was the war--
the next year,

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the event that
Picasso memorialized,

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the bombing of Guernica,
which was the first mass

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bombing of a civilian
population of a city, which

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has become regular
behavior normalized, right?

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And changed war forever, and
made from then on civilians

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the main target of it 90% now.

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I thought of this-- it's
called Up Against It, when

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Becka put me up against the
wall to take a picture today.

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I was like, oh no.

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The wall was white.

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Whitewashed lime that shines
in the sun until white

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is pure pain, searing the eyes.

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And the world was marked, pocked
by a spray of black holes,

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like nothing so much as the
dots in a child's puzzle,

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waiting for a line to
make sense of them.

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To pull from a scatter of
points of familiar shape.

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At the beginning
of the bad time we

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have come to think
of as usual, they

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stood a man here
against this wall,

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simply because of what he was.

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Something that made it hard
to do what they wanted.

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So they thought that if
they killed him first,

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at the very beginning,
the rest would come easy.

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His blood like a
red door opening

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into the future in which the
gypsy wind, capricious, always

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eluding them, would be stilled.

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Tied in a sack.

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And the every day, which
wore them down into grit

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under its heels, would
disappear into clouds of power.

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Their boots would
be real leather.

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The rawhide smell from
what they had taken

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and hadn't the time to cure.

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And if he were Lorca.

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García Lorca, the writer with a
fire in his hands, and he was,

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and if they stood him up against
this wall in its white that

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defeated the light, throwing
it back like a knife

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into the eyes.

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And if in that moment, as
they raised their guns,

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he remembered a dream he had
dreamed but a month before.

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A dream of a land surrounded
and butchered by shepherds.

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If all this were
true, and it is,

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then we approached
this wall at our cost,

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counting its black
holes like the shrunken

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emblems of the cosmos
eating back its own matter.

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And what then?

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Shall we paste up the placards
of a revolution in which we

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no longer believe?

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Shall we tear down
the wall, knowing

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another stands behind it,
and another, and another

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to the horizon of counting?

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Shall we line up the
children beside it,

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pointing at each
hole as a lesson

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through which like a
sieve, their hope will

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begin to drain out?

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Or shall we plant
flowering vines

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along the wall to
cover the record?

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And when each tendril, each
slow, wavering filament,

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each unruly winding
line of green

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is swaying along the wall,
looking for somewhere

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to anchor its urge
to go on growing.

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Verde, te quiero verde.

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What then?

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Why by then, in
the long twilights,

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in the hard work of
planting and watering,

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of watching and
waiting, by then we

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may have understood what
we can't now imagine.

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Desperate as we are
about the white wall,

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the holes in the shape
of a man, the mark

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they wanted to leave us.

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The line that fear
taught us to trace.

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So different from
the one that he left.

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The one whose shaped
left its trace

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in the heart, the balcony
open, the lungs spill of stars

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in the sky.

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The track of creations,
milky tongue, and listen.

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The shift and seethe of the
sap, forcing its slow way

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toward the branching twigs, the
ear-splitting crack as the end

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is riven by budding assault
breeze in the orchard.

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The small leaves
trembling with light.

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]