Global Anthem for an Unimaginable Day

Thinking of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)

            The Morning Shower Version

I sing of myself in the shower,
the water tumbling down my abs
like an ad for skin-cream bodywash 
& tropical fantasies.
I celebrate my pits, the grassy gullies
of my upstretched arms, voices splashing
down my chest and belly. I sing
to the rabbit in my loins,
to your body next to mine, the hillocks
and the warren door.
  
I sing in tears of love 
of my germanic heritage, four-part,
multi-hearted contrapunctilious harmony:
beethoven, bach, my grandparents,
bonhoeffer and einstein,
the millions who were massacred,
and the millions who made us who we are
because they lived. I celebrate 
those would not kill, 
and those who, wielding their unyielding 
crabby cannons, would.
  
I am a cornucopia of history’s compostables:
recycled rage, wisdom, control, chaos, 
roots, leaves & earth,
from generation to regeneration.
  
I hug my arms around me in the shower
to bring you close, bring into me old
wrinkled men and blue-skinned girls,
the raped and the rapists,
the free traders and the prostitutes, those with sad
livers and despairing immune systems,
the starving mothers, the alcoholic glue sniffers,
the bank presidents who make them possible.
  
Oh the delight of our efficiencies! I sing to 
the weary oil workers of shell and exxon,
the otter-slickers who give us jobs,
and the sleek auto-makers who take us to them.
Praise to the nigerians and arabs we sacrifice. 
Praise to the desert storms
that swirled our skirts up to new self-
indulgent heights.
  
I waltz buck naked with clasping tree-huggers,
buff-muscled tree-cutters,
tight-wad men in tailored suits
selling their children for another year
of labour lost. 
I hum of the saws and the green chain,
my sleepless body, my aching back,
the teachers paid from this store
of fallen trees,
the students at the wooden desks,
the poets scribbling wisdom and garbage
on these sacrificial leaves, bound in green chains,
to the grandchildren who will inherit
the fecula of our wine.
  
Praise to the righteous 
who remind us with guns, crosses, sickles,
and signs of gods within and without.
Praise to the preaching neo-Dawkinists
who snort to us of non-God
from logical pulpits. 
Death comes to us all,
and life, illogically.
Praise to the french for giving us
a nuclear underground and future to protest,
for wine to help us celebrate and to forget,
for arrogance to make us feel humble.
Praise to the nazis the stalinists the taliban 
the TV evangelical falandering trumpeters
for making us seem like the good guys.
And oh the chinese japanese
javanese how can I thank you enough
for the wonders of your orchids your walls
your sand beaches your stereo sets your batik
the rain forests you have devastated
the gold and nickel and oil
that enrich and enrage us
the jaundiced jokes you have given us?
  
All that I am is thanks to you.
  
I shout white is fine and
black is beautiful.
I belt out the happy blues of the half breed,
the dilly-dallying sperm, the twisted tongue,
the sugar babies franglophones métis
flat germans mulattoes creoles.
  
Let us create a movement and call it
one-quarter chinese one-eighth black 
some part indian-semitic-arab a pinch of aboriginal
some russian mongolian a bit of monkey
and a little white
is beautiful.
  
Let us tango our despair,
swirl, waltzing regretfully,
chorale our many losses,
crab canon unbecomingly,
to what we might become,
might still be, might undone.
  
Let us be Sisyphus natalensis Balthazar,
neophytes and acolytes,
fecal ball-rollers and dung robbers,
under the dusk’s smudged cerulean sky,
before a sun cracked by clouds,
rolling, just one more time,
this blessed mess we are
up one more hill, and down,
down into the unimagined,
blessedly unimaginable, tomorrow.