"Know the Names of Things"

Know the Names of Things

for immigrants everywhere anytime

Know the names of things.

How 3+1 equals nada

in a barrio flat. How many 

unknowns there are in a single

bottle of pills. How much

it costs to breath through

the nicotine, the anxiety,

the three times a million lost

nickels in the foreign exchange,

in a bushel of sterile seed.

Know the names of things.

How to live. How to love

the you in all. How to call

out to the impoverished ancestors.

How to feed a future. Call

it what you will. Call power

in a name. Name the world

to own it. Learn hammer

and sickle. Learn the many

names for drought. Name the 

expedient past, the succumbing future.

Name what you will. Will what

you name. The power of the tsunami

in the syllables of truth, the reconstruction

of the hurricane in the uplifting vowels.

Learn the names of all the treaties

never honored by our government.

Name the dead, too.

Know the names of things.

How to count. Count the many ways 

life changes life and death

changes nothing and never gives.

There is a way if you name 

it. If you follow it the road

will come. Be the strings that hold

up this house of time held

by the wisdom of the abuelas

with words holding taut the strands.

In the beginning was an absence.

Name that, too.

Know the names of things.

How to tell the singer

from the song. How to swear 

on a star, become the jury 

of one. How to tell over

the cacophony of a thieving

crow. How to chant the mastery

of who enslaves whom, who orders

the gun, the bomb, the shock

and awesome truth. Name this, too.

Know the names of things:

auricle from ventricle, aorta

from vena cavae, arteries from

aurioles; all matters of the heart.

Save with the words for it.

Then be it, a savior

with your words. We, 

the named, we, knowers

know the power, the power to name,

to see, to know, belongs

to the perceiver, the receiver

of knowledge — all in a name:

our name, your name, the stolen 

names, the original names,

the slaughtered names, the slaughtering

names, names for The People for people

who need no names, who need food, 

who need the crystal water

because 3+1 in a barrio flat

equals nada. Name this, too.

Know the names of things.

and heal. 

6/11/10

Lorna Dee Cervantes