PATRICK OCAMPO
Sound of the State It's only at the closing of daylight, when the sun paints a last line of red at the rim of the world and the wretched, stunted trees stand sentry over the desolation of the sickly grass, only when the birds quiet their dusty wings, when the hawks end their futile circles, and the kingbirds huddle and hush their harsh kittering cries, only at the end of the day, when you are driving along the road that is the decaying heart of America, only then can you hear the faint cry of the displaced spirits, wailing almost imperceptibly over the land still stained with souls. We do not belong, we will never belong, we are lost and far from our ancestors, and we died here, our bodies plowed over by the outraged land, free us, take us home. But there is no home, no resolution, no restitution, all that is left, are endless ghostly cries, and the sound of the insects popping yellow pockmarks against your windshield. This is the sound of the state, the sound of engines driving relentlessly across the landscape, and every dissenting voice, and every cry for mercy is shattered on plexiglass moving at 90 miles an hour towards what we think is God and progress. The song of the state was written back east by men who never saw the land and probably mistook us for Kansas, and if they wrote now, how could they make music out of the spattered sounds of voices dying against a blood-red sky? Maybe if we all stopped the engines, closed our eyes for one minute a day for a thousand years and spoke the simple word of forgiveness, maybe if we stopped talking and started walking the way of mercy, maybe if for a thousand years we asked and gave and became the unstrained quality of mercy, maybe then the voices would silence, and the song of the land would rise and heal the broken spirits and send them singing home. And maybe, if for a thousand years we were the very bones of mercy, maybe then we would be something worth singing about. |