Two Poems And Poets: Bill Gallegos And Alberto Moreno

It has been a very long time since I could read and appreciate poetry. I set aside reading Nazim Hikmet, my favorite poet, because the hopes that sustained him and animated his poetry---hopes that I share---have become too difficult for me to read and recollect. These hopes seem so far from where we are now that it is painful for me to consider them. And so much of modern poetry seems full of irony or tragedy or is written in the contexts of cultures and times that I don't understand that the poems are lost on me. It took Diane Gilliam's book "Kettle Bottom" to once more locate a poetry that speaks to me.

The two poems below rock me. The first is by Bill Gallegos, who I hope will count me as a friend or comrade. He is a great thinker and activist and I have learned much from him. The second poem is from Alberto Moreno, an especially gifted poet and mystic who I once had the honor of meeting and watching. I thought then that I was watching someone who was moving in another world.

There was a time---and it was not too long ago---when I considered Bill Gallegos' activism and Alberto Moreno's Sufi-like mysticism as opposing tendencies, as contradictory. That was in my ignorance. What is going on here is that both poets are holding up lamps in a world that sometimes feels quite dark. Light doesn't contradict light in a world in which darkness causes us to stumble. Please listen to both of these teachers.


Maceo Orlando -- My Lost/Found Treasure (Bill Gallegos)

Watching you jump from mother's womb/wet and loud/tiny lips telling the world .. that Maceo Orlando had landed ...
in Tinsletown

You so quickly ran the ragged edges of wonder/father chasing just behind ... And 'buela's hands leading you back to the soothing realm of tenderness.

You always shared that kinda moon smile/soft and warm/the funniest kind of sly. An easy laugh/like quick sips of joy ... from the warm/warm waters of your heart.

Always unafraid to touch/fast besitos on the old man's cheek/lighting up the dark spots of long, hard days.

You love to love/giving out the velvet embrace/easing the crazy befuddle of middle-age jefitos.

You are a diamond my son/shining ever brighter from the hits and misses of my own unsures: "Am I too hard?" "Am I too easy?"/"Should I do this?"/"Should I do that?"

You wandered sometimes lost in the complex labyrinth of adolescence.

But its all good now m'hijo/because you found your way/your heart led you home .... and healed the unhealable/relit the cold ashes/breathed life into tired lungs emptied by fear and loneliness.

That is the treasure you bring my son/shining like a cat's eyes in the darkness/chasing away the shadows that chill the heart.

Maceo Orlando, you are the answer to the why/the lyric to the song/the mystical phrase from the poem/the ending to the story/the warm hand which walks us through life.

Pops

***

Would you believe
That I once kept a secret
From myself
For fifty years?!
I tell you this in case you are keeping the same secret from your own heart
The secret that you are unconditionally and irreparably
Loved!
---Alberto Moreno