Fidel in Calcutta, India, 17 September 1973.
At one hundred, Fidel sits where evening Ash falls to the floor without proclamation – Along the Malecón, the young assemble The mercury rises. Bread is rationed thinner. Across the water, towers shine like answers; Freedom is a word the full pronounce Fidel asks for The century loosens softly in the salt air. The heat will rise. The guarded walls will rise. And yet a nurse still crosses town at midnight; Twilight withdraws along the Malecón.
Lowers its red flag over the bay;
A remembered cigar, no longer burning,
Lets one frail continent of ash give way.
Grey province, ruined tower, weightless state –
While prosperous clerks of the embargo
Add another lock to the iron gate.
Where waves interrogate the wounded stone;
The sea climbs higher, and the houses tremble,
Each balcony defending what it’s known.
A fan dies turning in a fevered room.
The walls around the island rise together,
Built out of statutes, signatures, and doom.
Here, paint abandons walls in turquoise scales.
A doctor walks beneath exhausted windows;
A fisherman repairs inherited sails.
When necessity is safely out of sight;
Here freedom counts the crops, repairs the clinic,
And studies by the failing evening light.
A twisted pod, green medicine, plain bread;
Small leaves persist where grand designs have withered
And feed the living and tease the dead.
The hand that held an age begins to shake.
A pulse is but a rumour in a body.
An island is a breath the sea may take.
The markets will perfect their careful no.
The body fails; the stone gives way; the shoreline
Forgets the names we carved long ago.
A teacher prises open the school door;
And hands from which the world has taken plenty
Divide the little, making it seem more.
The clock performs its little act of harm.
Ash falls; before the dawn, a hand rebuilds;
The sea lifts Cuba in its darkened arm.
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