We Are All Whitman: #40: Savage
The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?
Walt Whitman (39)
There is something in the root of
the word jungle that conjures,
savage; it challenges
the fictitious trappings of the civilized.
Someone revealed that my grandmother
used to be an anarchist.
I yearn for the discredited independence
of barbarity,
of the sort destroyed by conquest,
its rock solid wisdom,
its culture’s temples,
its communion with infinite nature,
its clear-sighted breath in the air
where water touches it.
I escape to the primitive frontier
with a liberated body
of the soul's hierarchy
and all its decrees.
I am native to the territory
of animals and forests,
mountains, lakes, universe of progeny,
audacious pioneer of my own center.
What civilized pomposity
does war embody?
That of sepulchers, injustices
and a heap of anonymous cruelties?
I, we, all of us want to be
the friendly and flowing savage
who subdues civilization
with arbitrary behaviors
like those of snow-flakes,
words simple as grass,
uncomb'd head,
laughter, and naiveté.
Hostile only against those who exhaust
the generosity of grains,
those who sacrifice the land,
sweet sprinklings of rain,
butterflies, flowers, their brothers and sisters,
those who uproot the tender pages
of nimble books of calendars,
those who sell freedom
with blood on their hands.
We long for the birth of
new forms from the tips of his fingers
and that, lawless, they might love us.
Copyright Credit: Luis Alberto Ambroggio, "We Are All Whitman: #40: “Savage”" from Todos somos Whitman/We Are All Whitman. Copyright © 2016 by Luis Alberto Ambroggio. Reprinted by permission of Arte Público Press.