Friday Poem: "Liberation Theology"

Liberation Theology

Open the gates and leave your life
Forget what you were taught to love
Close your ears to dalliances
Play and entertainment
Why pass your life at a child’s game
Surrounded by the doom of numbers
Walk out of your life as out of a cave
For although you were a stone
Now you are a flame

Put aside the language of death
And the silence of lost traces
Buried in the lined faces
In all those rain-soaked places
Where dark clouds descend like graces
And the wind turns the trees to shawls

Give up your hoarded places
Crushed into narrow spaces
Turning rehearsed pages
Among the frigid sons and daughters
Of ritual and sameness
Querulous as your losses

Escape this Arlington of aspiration
This wax museum of official dreams
The chill of  gauze cathedrals
Your fragile-fingered monuments
Money the incubus you invented
(Even now I hear it spending you)
Why dangle from time’s jaws
Say it was the wrong life
Or say it was not yours

Come then embrace refusal
At the place where history ends
Where all lies are revealed
No matter how hidden
All ways of life rejected without exception
Where the contented are tempted
And no nature is merely accepted
Here you will find dissatisfaction
And learn denial’s depths
You’ll have your fondest hopes to plunder
Your enemies will become your friends

8/25-10/25/97, 1/27-2/10/98, 3/6-3/7/98, 6/19/98, 9/18-9/19/98
Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.