Three Poems by Diane Kendig

The Stories That Can’t Be Stopped

People everywhere wish their own life, with all its

dark places that they sense, to be an experience not

only lived, but presented...disengaged from all the

elements that crush it.

--Jean-Paul Sartre

Two Ormigna-speaking Caucasians present themselves

in the Addis Ababa news room and claim to be the pair

kidnapped from there twenty years ago.

Their tale goes out over AP lines, no more efficient

than the lips of the kids who tell you they saw

the headless biker who haunts Gore Orphanage Road.

We never get the whole story, but the dark part

sticks the way the photo of those two sibling faces,

too often sunburned, stays thumbtacked in our minds.

From prison, Sartre nailed the thief’s impulse and mistake:

wanting to write everything, everything stays hidden.

We know the one spot in the woods where Poe wrote,

“The Raven,” but we can’t prove the child who appeared

there saying, “Nevermore,” though that story persists

like bad luck from a hat left on a bed,

like inmate talk of the suicide, the lobotomized,

the one who died of a heart attack

while guards fumbled to dress and shackle him.

(We know he could not go even in an ambulance

if he didn’t wear his travel orange and chains.)

I taught a foster child who thought “Nevermore”

when they held him up to his mother’s casket,

“her beautiful white box,” he called it at age three.

His said his heart broke in that moment.  The left side

of his chest was no cliché.  He fingered

its scarred ridge twelve years later as he wrote me

his autobiography, summarizing all the intervening years,

“Well, then, the wonders came and went.”

Mandela in Montreal, 1990

Your personal world echoes

in ways common enough,

a parking lot....

--Robert Creeley

Although a drizzly day

in June in Champs de Mars,

thousands could more easily stand it

than they stood it a century ago

in November cold as only

Montreal after Louis Riel hanged.

City Hall went up

with its back to the site,

but still the people gathered here

against conscription.

A new courthouse rose

so high its shadow cast a pall

over the promenade, finally fit

for only a parking lot.

For Mandela’s day, the lot was paved,

sodded, painted, and set with a stage,

bannered MANDELA, as though

the title of a new musical.

For hours the musicians sound-checked,

dress rehearsed, then did their work

for hours past the set hour, right up to

a choir that started Nkosi, sikelel'i

Afrika--then stopped

then began again as Mandela appeared

to shouts of Amandla!

his native Xhosa, “power!”

that surged in his voice, reverberated

against the lot’s three walls:

“Twenty-seven years ago

when I went to prison

I had no vote....”

(no vote,  no vote, no vote--)

That first echo stopped

the applause and silence

held out for a right to more.

“Today I still have no vote....”

(no vote, no vote, no vote....)

Seventy-two years old, POW-thin,

having withstood so much, still standing,

far-reaching, far-hearkening.

“Our people continue to be killed....”

(be killed, be killed, be killed....)

Montreal echoed, the world’s walls echoed,

the backs of the leaders

he would have to see all week

had to face the millions

that stood in the rain to hear

words that reverberate

years later, though the hasty sod

has buckled and died and cars

pack the space again

The words reverberate:

“Injustice continues....”

(continues, continues, continues....)

to the millions who stand all these years later,

in Toronto, Montreal, Boston

and New York, then Paris,

London, and Oslo and--

“Who will stand with us to the end?”

My Last Night in Managua

The day before, two sets of neighbors said

they’d been interviewed by men in a black van

with darkened windows and international plates,

asking if I had really lived there all year. 

My neighbors replied, pues sí, or at least

I think so, but now I am not so positive:

Lili, has Diana really lived in that house all year? 

Well, not all year, maybe nine months. And on and on

in the Nicaraguan round about, till the men left.

The next day a white van followed me

from Ernesto Cardenal’s studio,

maybe two miles in that torrid March heat,

then pulled alongside me, at the edge

of my barrio, and the side door slid open

on the cool air of the Cultural Attaché who asked,

“Have you seen MacGregor?” My colleague.

Of course I had seen him. Who hadn’t.

Arriving home, I found in my living room

two boxes of textbooks, missing for months from the APO,

just inside my padlocked door, each box slit open,

otherwise untouched, topped off with VOA tracts.

That night, the power went out again, not

the daily planned outage noon to two but one

sudden cut of lights and music all down the block

at 8 p.m., which always seemed so dark to me,

a Midwesterner expecting light till after nine

when it’s that hot. Then, too, my phone went dead,

though no one else’s did.

My husband had left three weeks before

for a new job, and I felt so different from the day

we had arrived together at the U.S. Embassy where

a huge Marine, maybe 19 years old, stood in jungle fatigues,

behind reinforced glass, scowling, his chest crossed with an M16

we barely noticed for the three-foot portrait of smiling Dan Quayle

they made us wait in front of, which made us laugh and laugh.