Alabanza

Alabanza

by Martin Espada

Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye, a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo, the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.

Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua, for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.

Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish rose before bread. Praise the bread.

Alabanza. Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium. Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations: Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.

Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning, where the gas burned blue on every stove and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers, hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.

Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher who worked that morning because another dishwasher could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen and sang to herself about a man gone.

Alabanza. After the thunder wilder than thunder, after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows, after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs, after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen, for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo, like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face, soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations across the night sky of this city and cities to come.

Alabanza. I say, even if God has no face.

Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other, mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:

Teach me to dance. We have no music here.

and the other said with a Spanish tongue:

I will teach you. Music is all we have.

Open Thread - Question Everything Edition

I don't actually have any questions, and it's not necessary that you have any either - I just thought we might as well have a place where we can throw "conventional wisdom" out the window, if we want.

Or, jabber about whatever anyone wants! I, as they say, have got nothin' .

Caution! Fairie Crossing

US developers think they have it bad, having to plan around spotted owls and other endangered species. Little do they know what other wee creatures could be in the way...

Fairies stop developers' bulldozers in their tracks

VILLAGERS who protested that a new housing estate would "harm the fairies" living in their midst have forced a property company to scrap its building plans and start again.

Marcus Salter, head of Genesis Properties, estimates that the small colony of fairies believed to live beneath a rock in St Fillans, Perthshire, has cost him £15,000. His first notice of the residential sensibilities of the netherworld came as his diggers moved on to a site on the outskirts of the village, which crowns the easterly shore of Loch Earn.

He said: "A neighbour came over shouting, `Don't move that rock. You'll kill the fairies'." The rock protruded from the centre of a gently shelving field, edged by the steep slopes of Dundurn mountain, where in the sixth century the Celtic missionary St Fillan set up camp and attempted to convert the Picts from the pagan darkness of superstition.

"Then we got a series of phone calls, saying we were disturbing the fairies. I thought they were joking. It didn't go down very well," Mr Salter said.

In fact, even as his firm attempted to work around the rock, they received complaints that the fairies would be "upset". Mr Salter still believed he was dealing with a vocal minority, but the gears of Perthshire's planning process were about to be clogged by something that looked suspiciously like fairy dust.

[...]

"A lot of people think the rock had some Pictish meaning," Mrs Fox said. "It would be extremely unlucky to move it."

Mr Salter did not just want to move the rock. He wanted to dig it up, cart it to the roadside and brand it with the name of his new neighbourhood.

The Planning Inspectorate has no specific guidelines on fairies but a spokesman said: "Planning guidance states that local customs and beliefs must be taken into account when a developer applies for planning permission." Mr Salter said: "We had to redesign the entire thing from scratch."

The new estate will now centre on a small park, in the middle of which stands a curious rock. Work begins next month, if the fairies allow.

This is even better than the Garden Gnome Liberation Front!

I showed this story to a British friend, mainly because I wasn't sure if it was something real or a spoof (British humor is sometimes difficult to get... there you are, laughing away and then you finally figure out that the joke was on you). Anyway, he said that it seemed real to him... in many rural societies in Britain pixies and elves and fairies are still very much believed in. Or, at least such a part of the thousands of years old (pre-Christianity) traditions that actual belief or disbelief is immaterial.

That makes sense and considering that a number of cultures have `little people' traditions, although by different names, well... who knows?

[This is a news article from the beginning of the year I am just posting as filler, cuz everyone seems to be on writer's block break. Besides... in my opinion, it's just the best story ever. ]