Not Words But Hands

for Yusef Komunyakaa


We have no words for you.

The poets hear the news,
this death unspeakable as the babble
of an auctioneer at the slave market.

There are no words in our language to say this.
We are singers who moan,
prophets with tongues missing
like the clappers of empty bells.

In your poems there are singers, prophets, slaves.
You hammered words for all of them.
But we have no words for you;
there is no name for the grief in your face.

We only have our hands, to soap your shirts
or ladle soup for you, grip your shoulder
or dim the lamp so you can sleep with visions
of the ball field by the lumber company
wars and wars ago.

And this, this poem,
this is my hand.


(c) Martin Espada, The Republic of Poetry