Photographic memory

I was in Mississippi
meeting
with
my ancestors.

the most recent middle passage
called katrina
the beautiful woman
who drowned us in her sleep

katrina, marina's sister
malinalli
who loved us so
who spoke in tongues
and has been gestating a new dream
giving us birth for the last five hundred years. katrina

we are ghosts, hardly a breath in cosmic time, space

here we are stepping into space, expanding without end

collapsing in on all the evil,

all the maladies,

all the suffering we took

poof, everything, everyone, gone,

disappeared,

not even dust to show for our pain.

My eyes are a bridge of DNA

genetic code for the sixth sun

so no one will be forgotten

so no one will become

a tear of oblivion

either we are all living

or we are all walking into the light

the dark matter of our resistance.

The headlights blind the police,

thinking,

believing

they have power.

What is power?

The State,

his armies,

his dungeons,

his death sentences,

his working class,

his nuclear weaponry,

nuclear energy?

A tsunami

will make us forget

everything.

The sun bats her eyelashes

in a flash

only she remains

staring into the space

an earthquake, a seaquake, a moon stops over swallows the sun?

[All photographs copyrights: arnoldo garcía; taken during a community solidarity delegation meetings with their counterparts in Louisiana and Mississippi, November 2005, in the aftermath of the Katrina hurricane.]