Two wings of one bird, said the exiled poet
 whose words burned too many holes of truth
 through the colonial air of a different iron-toothed occupation.
 Nothing divides the suffering of the conquered.
 Two wings, she said, of a single bird, with one heart between them,
 taking bullets and roses, soldiers and prison bars and poetry,
 into one pulse of protest.  One bird she insisted
 as the ship pulled away from San Juan headed for Havana, 1879.

 A century later we are still the wounded wing,
 fluttering, dragged through the waves, another empire
 plucking feathers from living flesh.  White egret among the foam,
 cried the poet, returning after long years in the dry solitude of Spain:
 garza, garza blanca. Those ruffled reefs are infested now
 with unexploded bombs. Pastures where white birds
 still grace the backs of cattle, are dusted with the toxic waste
 of rehearsal for invasion, that seeps into the blood of children,
 so that cancer is a required course in the highschools of Vieques,
 giving a whole new meaning to the term "drop out".
 I was born into an occupied country.  I am that wing.

 What kind of Jew are you, receiving bullets and roses
 as if in a Palestinian heart?
 I am the Jewish great-great-grandaughter of  Puerto Rican slaveholders.
 I am the Puerto Rican great-great-grandaughter of Ukrainian socialists.
 I am the surviving branch of a family tree split at the turn of the last
 century
 holding the photograph of nameless cousins
 who missed the last train to Siberia
 and fell into the trenches of summer
 as Nazi armies rolled across the farmlands of Kherson.
 I am the educated grandaughter of a Puerto Rican seamstress
 who never went past the eighth grade,
 whose fingers bled into the spandex of sweatshop assembly line girdles,
 a long subway ride from the barrios where she lived,
 the grandaughter of an electrician
 wiring battleships in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, of a communist
 studying law at night and serving deli by day, and of a social worker
 trying to plug the holes in immigrant lifeboats.
 I am a daughter of occupation and conquest, of deportation and escape.
 I am a daughter of people who were outgunned and refused to die.
 I am a colonial subject with a stone in my hand when I listen to the news.
 I am a fierce Latina Jew holding out a rose to Palestine.

 I am the Jewish grand-niece of a Puerto Rican WWII soldier
 cracking up in the bloody Pacific in the service of an army
 that always sent the brown men in first.  I am the Puerto Rican cousin
 of Jewish evacuees trying to flee eastward, shot in the back
 by Ukrainian collaborators who lived just down the road.
 I am the daughter of red pacifists married in the year of Korea,
 a two-winged child conceived as the Rosenbergs died,
 born as Lolita was shackled
 into her quarter century of punishment for shooting into the air.
 I was born Jewish in an occupied Caribbean land, speaking Spanish
 with the accent of escaped slaves and hungry coffee laborers,
 because my great-grandfather would not fight Japan for the Tsar,
 because he evaded yet another imperial draft,
 and washed up in New York City
 where barrio meets shtetl, girl meets boy and solidarity was my lullabye.

 What kind of  independentista are you, to weep for Israeli soldiers
 drafted into accepting atrocity as a fact of life,
 beating out the ritmo of kaddish for colonialists
 wrongfully killed in rightful revolution
 on the conga of your caribe heart?
 I am the proud cousin of a banned Boricua writer
 climbing out of his deathbed to raise the flag of Puerto Rico
 on the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion, just two weeks before he
 died
 of tb contracted in the bitter prison cells of Valladolid.
 I am a distant relative of the first woman of Puerto Rico
 burned by the Inquisition in the name of Christ, for being a secret Jew.
 I am the descendant of hacendados
 who worked their own slave children to the bone in tobacco fields
 ripening over the traces of uprooted plantings of casabe
 and of the pale brown daughters of dark women,
 taken into the marriage beds of landholding men,
 criada servants deemed good enough for younger sons,
 setting their wide cheeks and mouths into their children's bones.
 I am the descendant of invaders and invaded,
 now riding high on history's wheel, now crushed below,
 of those evicted and their village burned,
 of those who rode the horses and set the flames.

 What kind of song is this? Whose side are you on?
 Two wings, I say with the exiled poets of my country
 to my disposessed and disposessing cousins
 in the land it seems that everyone was promised.
 Two wings with a single heart between them:
 intifada and partisaner, refusnik and cimarron.
 Nothing divides the suffering. One bird full of bullets and roses,
 one bird with its wounded pinions,
 one heart that if it breaks is broken. I know there are two bloody
 wings,
 but it is one bird trying to lift itself into the air,
 one bird turning in circles on the ground, because
 two wings rising and falling together,
 is the forgotten principle of flight. Two wings
 torn by tempestuous weather.
 One bird struggling into the light.

listen to aurora levin morales read this poem.

“The german Alfred-Wegener-Institute is transmitting a MP3-livestream from Antarctica. They put four hydrophones 70 m underneath the shelf ice and 90 m above the ocean ground through drilled holes in the thick ice sheet. In close proximity to the open water the microphones catch the calls of sea mammals living in this remote region … Only occasionally the electronic-sounding concierto of the seals is interrupted by calving glaciers and colliding icebergs. This recording though baffled the scientists because it doesn’t belong to any sea creature known and nobody heard ice breaking like this before. It’s your guess.”

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

Margaret Atwood