ABQ Cultural Conference

Histories of Social and Community Activism

Margaret Randall, Hakim Bellamy, 
Michele Welsing, Roberto Rodriguez, 
John Crawford
Albuquerque Cultural Conference, 
Sunday, August 28, 2011

Love Letter to Albuquerque

Love Letter to All the Kansas City Plants

Love letter to all the Kansas City plants To the workers from the old Bendix plant Where the congressional representatives call on them To return their complaints about exposure to radioactivty To their offices Making nuclear bomb parts never meant to Our families that we would wait the Excrutiating hospital wait For diagnoses and uncertainty To name the origins of un-nameable dis-ease To document the slow, agonizing deaths of loved ones And to wait for a check There is no trade for rising Freshened by sleep Ready to work, play, love, garden There is no payment possible No dollar sign to erase The ravages of the daughters of uranium The dollar is not a cure for 35 and 40 years of Successive service The dollar cannot bring back our dead Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, uncles, sons.... "I miss you", she whispers... She lays on top of his grave In the sun And tries to remember Their first and last kisses The photographs Are losing their colors And her dreams begin in black and white now They are always truncated She wakes up startled And sits up wondering Desperately searching the smooth sheets next to her Falling back to the abyss Of loss In tears Now they're building Another Kansas City Plant And the same congressman who wants Her to report her loss to him Has paved the way by selling Bonds and tax breaks And with nausea She instantly realizes that if It continues She will not be the last woman widowed to Mysterious illness She will not be the last mother Who cannot explain to a daughter Why her sacrifice has a price A dollar amount Attached to incomprehensible loss All the Kansas City Plants Have leaf bugs All the leaf cutter bugs Reproduce more rapidly Than you And I So that when radiation leaks When human precautions against Something unseeable Unsmellable Unfeelable Intangible Omnipresent Fails Well, you see, then that is when The suffering begins The leaf cutter bugs Will start to lose appendages Or have shorter antennae Their wings shriveled or Spotted with dis-ease And we brush the aside They are so tiny, and their relationship To the Kansas City Plants So ordinary So unnoticeable We don't have so many lightning bugs They used to carpet the evening In bursts of phosphorescence Now they are occasional And I no longer have the heart to Run to catch one Its truly like the hippies Who used to blanket the shores of 47th street Resisting the massacre in 'Nam Greying now, some lineup to be arrested One by one At The Kansas City Plant And I fancy those brave enough To resist Are also those brave enough to heal To a person, they are our heroes To each of them there is a time and rythym Of the heartbeat of survival There is the comittment to see through The layers of dollar bills piled On the top of an industry Unspeakably littered with the Carcasses of soldiers unprotected Marshall Islanders and Shoshone and Japanese  And those from Maralinga Whose ancestral homelands and reefs were Literally exploded into radioactive dust That fell, softly killing them and all that grows And they asked me why I do this work Why I stick with this theme Why I have allowed the political To become my artmaking And it is one story The story of a beautiful Shoshone man Married to my sweet sister Their eldest boy a few months older than my own The story of a father who wrote brilliantly About environmental racism Who, as a child, on that day July 6, 1962, was outside playing In his aunties garden In Duckwater Nevada When the United States military Conducted the Sedan underground nuclear test And blew a bomb buried in the sands of the desert In the heart of the Ruby Valley Sending a radiactive pink cloud Northwards Towards the center of Duckwater Aunties green garden turned black that day And that little boy Would grow to be a husband and father And leave a widow and a four year old son To remember him always To mourn that indescribable loss My sister is full of a sweet sadness That keeps her quietly struggling For justice But because her husband was Shoshone And not an engineer At Bendix Or Honeywell Because he was an indigenous child And not a Navy recruit with welding goggles Observing the explosion And then sweeping radioactive coral dust From the ships deck with a broom.... She cannot prove that her suffering and Loss in the face of leukemia Will ever be worth any of the Congressman's Dollar bills So this love letter to the Kansas City Plants Asks simply that there be no more sweet sadness That we make no more widows And orphans That we pay attention to that Which we can neither feel, hear, or see Let Kansas City plants refer Only to that which grows green Provides the bounty of fresh Survival True wealth Health So that there are no more sisters, sons, brothers, mothers In mourning Crumpled onto grave sites Ready to trade all the dollar bills In the congressional stores For just one more hour A day A single kiss