Election Book & Ballot Box
Ballot Box
Election Book
"I want a kind of poetry that doesn't bother either to praise or curse at parties or leaders, even systems, but that reveals how we are - inwardly as well as outwardly - under conditions of great imbalance and abuse of material power. How are our private negotiations and sensibilities swayed and bruised, how do we make love - in the most intimate and in the largest sense - how (in every sense) do we feel? How do we try to make sense?"
-- Adrienne Rich
"The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind."
-- Marina Abramovie
Imagine the Angels of Bread Analysis
This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail of the roofdeck or levitating hands in praise of steam in the shower; this is the year that shawled refugees deport judges who stare at the floor and their swollen feet as files are stamped with their destination; this is the year that police revolvers, stove-hot, blister the fingers of raging cops, and nightsticks splinter in their palms; this is the year that darkskinned men lynched a century ago return to sip coffee quietly with the apologizing descendants of their executioners. This is the year that those who swim the border's undertow and shiver in boxcars are greeted with trumpets and drums at the first railroad crossing on the other side; this is the year that the hands pulling tomatoes from the vine uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine, the hands canning tomatoes are named in the will that owns the bedlam of the cannery; this is the year that the eyes stinging from the poison that purifies toilets awaken at last to the sight of a rooster-loud hillside, pilgrimage of immigrant birth; this is the year that cockroaches become extinct, that no doctor finds a roach embedded in the ear of an infant; this is the year that the food stamps of adolescent mothers are auctioned like gold doubloons, and no coin is given to buy machetes for the next bouquet of severed heads in coffee plantation country. If the abolition of slave-manacles began as a vision of hands without manacles,then this is the year; if the shutdown of extermination camps began as imagination of a land without barbed wire or the crematorum, then this is the year; if every rebellion begins with the idea that conquerors on horsebackare not many-legged gods, that they too drown if plunged in the river, then this is the year. So may every humiliated mouth, teeth like desecrated headstones, fill with the angels of bread. -- Martín Espada |
The author of “Imagine the Angels of Bread,” Martin Espada, intended for his poem to show readers how the world should work, by reversing current societal roles in order to inspire real change. He uses the phrase “This is the year” to portray the idea that it would be quick and easy to change a few things for the better. Espada uses intense imagery in all of his stanzas about wrongs that could be quickly righted if people simply tried.
Espada begins his poem by saying “This is the year that squatters evict landlords, gazing like admirals from the rail of the roof deck or levitating hands in praise of steam in the shower.” in order to portray the idea that squatters must evict landlords in order to finally take a shower, instead of simply being offered one. The author goes on to speak of, “shawled refugees deporting judges who stare at the floor and their swollen feet as files are stamped with their destination” in order to show how judges don’t witness the realities that refugees suffer. They can never empathize because at the end of the day, they get to go home to their families. How easy would it be for judges to sympathize with those who suffer at the hands of corrupt governments? In the beginning of the poem, Espada explains how “this will be the year” over and over before every major stanza, but later on in the poem he goes on to say “if”, followed by horrible past events and how those issues were resolved by “visions,” “imagination” and “ideas.” This proves that all of the negative things of the past changed simply because of people first imagining things differently. Having determination and an idea is the first step towards enacting positive change. |
Below are pictures of my Surrealism Book, my "Ode to a Common Thing" sculptures, and my Election Book on my #Shelfie shelf.