By Bill Wylie-Kellermann

empire,
crouched to devour,
breathes, like a dragon, winter darkness upon us:
decrees go out, are believed and obeyed, indictments
are suppressed, privilege covers the blunt ends of supremacy;
widescreen redundancies brutalize, dull, the mind; the most basic human

rights as to water or life are violated as practical policy, a financial necessity.

education is dismantled by race. children, students, girls, go disappeared with impunity.

it’s the massacre of innocence. robot planes patrol the skies looking down on weddings and

funerals, on targets and their collateral damage. the holy city is militarized and divided, like a

land occupied. The sweet earth is fracked and poisoned; its winds and waters whipped, scortched

or polar vortexted; it’s all one thing: the world is tortured, reduced to extremities moral, material.

but a crack. the light

(we are warned as in a dream, and so promised) in history, in creation, in community, in human

flesh, is not overcome. look at the faces of this movement: new and young – hands high, insisting

to breathe, lying down, standing up, blocking the way, discovering resistance, inventing

love-in-action, sharing water, saving and scattering the seeds, while a host

of heaven, ancestors, martyrs, elders presente, movement saints

and singers, the very disappeared now chant glory

and imperial demise as a single song, as if birth

were a sign irrepressible, mangered as a child

who cries this light upon us

emmanuel