Dream of Pointing the Finger Back

The Delegation

I have a recurring dream that takes place in a decolonized Americas. In it, I am watching, or part of, a delegation to not-quite-the-UN, to vote and deliberate but also to deliver a version of a speech I have now heard in hundreds of languages. We come to point the finger back, to lay the task upon all those empires that remain: now it is your turn to put away the vestiges of capital and colony.

A few weeks ago, I heard a peer speak his version of it in Nahuatl. He lets us call him Marcos, but his mother calls him Huemac. I recall the beauty of his voice, of Nahuatl’s lilting weaving syllables like the sound of rain on a pond, like sweet spring water burbling full of life. I felt pride hearing him speak, like a blue whale crying elated in an ocean the size of my heart, my heart the size of an ocean.

The conference’s interpreter corps struggles to keep up with what they call our delegation’s antics. See, our young domain has countless names but no official language. You’ll find Spanish on most of our documents, English on some, but we reject choosing a singular tongue emphatically, joyously. I have heard our delegation speak in Ojibwemowin, Chinukwawa, Haitian Creole, Farsi, Urdu -- because our one people is every people, and our tongue is every tongue. The miracles of love and dignity live in every body, and can be spoken in every language, but never exactly the same. That is our strength: our differences. What distinguishes anyone makes all of us stronger, if we can be wise enough to understand how.

The delegation declares how we have abolished poverty, plague, famine, illiteracy, and every other evil that cleverness and compassion can foil. The speaker then challenges the rest of the sitting powers to do so too. Now it is your turn. We have no more excuses for the trappings of empire. Now we can stand together as neighbors astride the whole planet, to carry the weight and responsibility of shaping what our children inherit. The spirit of the settler lies dead in its own home. Now it is your turn to bury those devils that remain.

Sometimes it's me at the podium, spitting fire in my heavily-accented Rose City English, but I prefer to take that duty only when nobody else wants it. I tend to think the world has tired of English. I have.

When I tell it, here's how it goes:

Now It Is Your Turn

Now it is your turn
To put away the vestiges
Of capital and colony.
In the place once called America
Everyone eats. Everyone thrives
Always by choice.
Prisons are empty; schools are full.
Hospitals, trains, grocers, and libraries,
Plentiful and gratis.
The water is clear like an open mind,
The air no worse than foggy.
Now it is your turn
To put away the vestiges
Of profit and privation.
In the place once called America
The dictatorship of price rules no more.
The council of our compassion prevails
And it rules with ambitions we animate
With a genuine concern for one another.
Now it is your turn
To put away the vestiges
Of imperial ire and covetous conquest.
We call upon you as neighbors
Because this is planetary stewardship
Not some international rivalry.
It is our privilege and our challenge
To seek and lay the highest roads
Of our most sacred ways.
Now it is your turn
To put away the vestiges
And beat us at a new game
That we dare to call love.