Introit and Kyrie - for Victor Jara

they have taken the village/your block is on fire/in the unsuspecting hours of December near Christmas/of September 1973/of Spring Break/of Election Day/while the world whirrs onward in electric bliss. your brother/your neighbor/her husband/has been flattened in his car/has been burned in her house/has simply disappeared. your sister/your teacher/his daughter/split into limbs and trunk portions/by bulldozer/by machete/by soldier boys/by good neighbors/the body/unmade as couch cushions on curbsides/flung into stinking pits/mineshafts/buried away and denied/an endless sum of empty bodies


where have the voices gone
the mad prophets in the wilderness
angry cameras and frantic pens to catch
one hundred
two hundred thousand
lives spilled out of the glass
-just a blade across a windshield
a flick of the remote

America yawns in her sleep
in Basra, women lie under a spitting sky
outside the torn pages of their ancestral homes
in Sudan, the devil rides out of nightmares
dripping poison and dust
and in Aceh, in Rwanda -
remainders are carried
and crossed out
as columns in a ledger
the children America has abandoned are terrified of water, grass, and open sky

Dear Victor Jara, today I heard of a family
and a best Sunday suit
burned in the street
and I am stuffed with grief

hands pilot unmanned
into dishes and dinner
seeking out some utensil to grasp
for you
I press fingertips into the darkness of a bedroom
and pack unsteady prayers
into the slightest part that yields

they took your hands, Victor Jara
kicked your guitar at you
and told you to play

America tells herself
in the mirror
"we are doing all we can"
I tell myself in the mirror
"I am so sorry"

we fill our cars we walk our dogs
apologies evaporating
useless as second-hand smoke

you see,
unlike the books i have promised to read
thank you cards never sent -
the world will not wait
patiently
this is picking up speed
people are dying faster
more efficiently

you were only one of a million -
Chile, Rwanda, Darfur, and Jenin
buried in newspapers and prisons
under Paris Hilton and the irony of "Survivor"
you are an accident I overheard on the radio

and it is your story, Victor Jara
that holds your name among folk heroes
America waits for lives
to become legends
before rousing
from the comfort of indifference

where have our prophets gone?
their voices choked with blood and hope -
artists and activists,
charged
to point and shoot

as watchers, light-bringers -
write the sentence that will stop a bullet
write the poem that will crush a heart
remake it into an open hand

pass the story mouth to mouth
as if lungs depended on it
let words light themselves in effigy
on the white house lawn

say something
to stop this train - or just drive it into the wreckage yourself
art is the little red coat
in the grey sea

the hope of the world
is the angry American
with a tight purse
and a pena paintbrush
and postage

it is an unjust world
that takes hands away
only from those that would use them

Kyrie Eleison, Victor