Poetry For Social Change: Martín Espada - Imagine The Angels of Bread

Sometime during my illustrious (and I use that term loosely) undergrad years, I became one of "those people" who was fond of poetry, the non-rhyming kind to boot. There's something about hard learned lessons, and hard won victories, or desperate caveats with meanings thinly veiled that seem to pierce the subconscious and lodge deep within the soul.... What was I saying? Oh, yes, poems tell the truth in ways that make you let your guard down.

In honor of that subtle power, I have recently adopted a piece by Martín Espada as my mantra for social change. "Imagine the Angels of Bread" says that all change begins with a vision, sometimes remarkably small, of a world different than the one that now exists. That's a great message for people like me who sometimes can't see the forest for all the trees.


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 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.

- excerpted from Loeb, P. R. (2004). The impossible will take a little while: A citizen's guide to hope in a time of fear. New York: Basic Books. pp.218-220