The Gate (for James Baldwin)

There is a gate at the end of the world
and it is the mouth of a burning paradise

There is a charming flower that drinks
from the neck of the land it bleeds; 
and stares with hatred at the desert rain

There is a shining city of ten-thousand stories
and each floor writhes in standstill, 
sinking beneath the sunset glass
(time’s vengeance is a swift horizon); 
while the citizens below, like shells
crash to dust against the pounding waves:
scattered, diffusing less than light, alone in separate agony

And somewhere, somehow
at the end of all this…

There is a people of darker veins who erupt:
who rebel as an earthquake does, setting fire and flood
to the garden of earthly delights
that would descend upon them as a mass grave; 
and so: turn the liar’s siege upon himself

There is a nation that stands for all nations,
all religions, all visions;
all freedom struggles, all metaphors;
all parchment scars and all futures;
and it is a Black nation
written with stolen breaths from the American sun

There is a door that each of us must enter
(today in Gaza — and tomorrow…?)
and the price of its ticket is death:
death of the false self,
death of the false prophets,
death of the soothing lie told to get by,
death of the blindness that governs a nation’s fate,
death of the coward’s silence that blinks away
the blood of martyrs like so much dirt from your eyes

There is a child there too, with mangled limbs
and a soft expression, even in death:
and you will not look away

There is a river at the end of this world
and the beginning of a new one:
birthed from the blood of these martyrs
under a sparrow's clear sky

There is a memory of a river with a green stem
and on the banks, a boy lies weeping;
a universe murdered;
and the song that enters him
is the one he will hold like a knife,
tenderly, like love: forever

There is a gate in the trampled heart 
of every city: whose road leads back
to a mountain burning in our midst;
and the mountain,
whose eyes are the electric moon /
whose crown seizes like thunder /
whose voice is an unspent flame,
asks, by its very existence,
the only question there is:

What price your life, and
what price the child’s?
What price peace, and
what price freedom?