<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><h1><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Imagine The Angels of Bread</span></font></h1><p>This is the year that squatters evict landlords,<br>gazing like admirals from the rail<br>of the roofdeck<br>or levitating hands in praise<br>of steam in the shower;<br>this is the year<br>that shawled refugees deport judges<br>who stare at the floor<br>and their swollen feet<br>as files are stamped<br>with their destination;<br>this is the year that police revolvers,<br>stove-hot, blister the fingers<br>of raging cops,<br>and nightsticks splinter<br>in their palms;<br>this is the year<br>that darkskinned men<br>lynched a century ago<br>return to sip coffee quietly<br>with the apologizing descendants<br>of their executioners.</p><p>This is the year that those<br>who swim the border’s undertow<br>and shiver in boxcars<br>are greeted with trumpets and drums<br>at the first railroad crossing<br>on the other side;<br>this is the year that the hands<br>pulling tomatoes from the vine<br>uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,<br>the hands canning tomatoes<br>are named in the will<br>that owns the bedlam of the cannery;<br>this is the year that the eyes<br>stinging from the poison that purifies toilets<br>awaken at last to the sight<br>of a rooster-loud hillside,<br>pilgrimage of immigrant birth;<br>this is the year that cockroaches<br>become extinct, that no doctor<br>finds a roach embedded<br>in the ear of an infant;<br>this is the year that the food stamps<br>of adolescent mothers<br>are auctioned like gold doubloons,<br>and no coin is given to buy machetes<br>for the next bouquet of severed heads<br>in coffee plantation country.</p><p>If the abolition of slave-manacles<br>began as a vision of hands without manacles,<br>then this is the year;<br>if the shutdown of extermination camps<br>began as imagination of a land<br>without barbed wire or the crematorium,<br>then this is the year;<br>if every rebellion begins with the idea<br>that conquerors on horseback<br>are not many-legged gods, that they too drown<br>if plunged in the river,<br>then this is the year.</p><p>So may every humiliated mouth,<br>teeth like desecrated headstones,</p><p>fill with the angels of bread.</p><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>- Martin Espada</div><div><br></div></body></html>