A poetic reflection on the new year... always imagine, always hope. Blessed 2011 to all!

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"Imagine the Angels of Bread"

by Martín Espada

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 crematorium,

then this is the year;

if every rebellion begins with the idea

that conquerors on horseback

are 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.

According to the Prophet Amos

Walter Brueggemann’s comments on the minor prophets point out the poetic nature of the prophets as distinct from the practicality of the “real-world” power elite: the government rulers, church leaders, etc. In particular, Amos, the prophet from the Southern Kingdom was called by God to leave his home and call the people of Israel in the North back to their covenantal faith. How easy it is for us to distance ourselves from the prophets and alienate ourselves from their message. But the prophets are people just like us; Dan Berrigan writes, in Minor Prophets, Major Themes that Amos is a “veritable nobody.” This shepherd - Berrigan calls him “dirt poor...a scrub farmer” - is not theologically sophisticated or endowed with all the privileges of authority that dominant culture requires the experts to have in order to be listened to. He lacks the credentials. “Then Amos answered Amaziah, ‘I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, “Go, prophesy to my people Israel”’” (Amos 7.14-15).

Invitation; no, command: “Go.” And Amos went - called to a life he could not have imagined or ordained for himself. For him to deny the call is for him to not believe in biblical faith, to cease to live the covenant. The task of the prophet is not to be heard but to speak: “Thus says the Lord....” For Amos and the prophetic consciousness, it is not so much about rebel rousing or causing trouble, but about entering into a life of solidarity - a lived, felt connection with the poor that breaks the prophets heart. The prophet does not come with a political agenda - although biblical faith encompasses the polis - but the prophet is about having faith, keeping faith, restoring faith.

Hence the pathos of both the poet and prophet is a shared characteristic. Not only is it in the best interest of the audience to heed the prophet’s words, but the emotional appeal cuts to the heart of the faith of the people of the Exodus. To be sure, the style of was attractive. The prophet’s faith is no prosaic soapbox: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5.24) Rolls off the tongue bu the content is a hard pill to swallow.

Even for the contemporary hearer of the Word - does the prophet’s message really call us to a turning away from the imperial faith of individualism and redemptive violence? Do we hear the call to a communal faith and restoring the covenant to its primary place of shared life in community? Better yet, are we even capable to “seek good and not evil, that [we] may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with [us], just as [we] have said?” (Amos 5:14). The prophets are always ridiculed to the sidelines, but tend to nag at us anyway. These days, in an age of plugging in and tuning out, we must ask ourselves if our faith is a nagging faith. If not...we could be in trouble.