Revolution

He’s growing anxious to know how it ends.
Men die and women too, the earth lives on.

Outside the city you can see from here
two pyramids you never see inside.

Up here you can pace, having the money
and the time to keep you out of the fray.

People throng the streets. They overthrow God.
He’s revealed to be a mere man, fleeing.

In Mexico the doctor was writing
his history of the revolution.

Who did he think he was? Leon Trotsky?
No, he objected, I’m not that damned cur.

He explained. Orders to fire on workers . . .
Lenin dying, Stalin named, Trotsky gone.

Guillermo and Cynthia in D. F.
He is seeking Frida and Diego,

how they greeted the Bolshevik Trotsky
unfrocked, Mexico in revolution . . .

She is assessing la casa azul.
She tells Guillermo to come to bed now.

Up here, the revolution triumphant,
everyone who worked to overthrow God

can make the Bible a true story now.
They will put back in what was taken out.

They will open the pyramids to us,
the tourists who were born in Mexico

of no mother, no father, orphans all.
We write Mexico City from Cairo.

Guillermo writes back. This is the moment,
he declares, to ask the doctor’s advice . . .

The doctor is shut up in the jungle,
writing between sleeps, unavailable.

Guillermo will go see the Vallejo
in jail, the railroad worker, the striker

whose skin knows no tears, bones no surrender.
The senora says no one can see him.

The doctor told her to call Guillermo.
Watch Eisenstein’s Que viva Mexico!

carefully, the senora says for him,
weather crackling in the telefono.

Guillermo is struck by how the peasants
are buried up to their necks and murdered

–or executed, as the judges say–
by men on horses whose hooves ride them down.

There you see the true price Mexico pays
even now, the senora says, freedom

exacts its toll before it is freedom.
When God flees, the weather changes itself

into new elements, each its own
fire, water, earth, and air. The galaxy

pulls through black holes all sucked in and swallowed
so constellations might wait until now

to sweep space of its cargo of fragments
and open the eye to show the unseen.

That’s all very well, Guillermo would say,
the world is a concept. This is the earth.

Two pyramids shine in the morning sun.
Revolution puts the world back on earth.

(21 February 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander