AMERICAN SILOS
The poem that began—and ends—this poetic polyphony, Our Blue Silo, was written the morning after the presidential election of 2024. I was trying to understand my part in the creation of this immense divide, this national wound, from which the election tore a bloody scab.
Bring down the silos that separate us — burst excluding bubbles — crush the cones of silence
open up the echo chambers of our politics.
I have no illusion of seeing this in my lifetime. These structures took too long to build, and are built of too costly a material — the very human lives, filled with human fault and folly, that have brought us to this painful polarization.
The binary choice in an election
requires a previous binary choice:
To Vote or Not To Vote;
before that choice:
To Care or Not To Care.
Is that a choice? A state of being?
“You can do what you want…but you can’t want what you want.”
— Robert Bolt, Lawrence of Arabia
Are silos built of forced binary choice?
Quintessentially American?
Built into the sacred Constitution?
Can we get out of them?
How do we invite the neighbors in?
“Maybe there are times so contentious or so painful that people simply withdraw to their own silos.”
—Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future
Silos as keeps, redoubts, watchtowers, hoards;
Fort Apache at the edge of conquest
of peoples, nations, homelands,
sovereignty ripped from bodies
politic, bodies of water, bodies of earth,
by force of inferior moral arms
to terrorize, dehumanize, to kill
the people here, in this untitled land.
Rematriate — Rematriate — Rematriate and free us all.
To be woke at my dawn in land studded
with silos, a stubble of towers, red,
black-n-white, blue, with interstitial green,
taller than trees—we burn those in the stoves—
in fruited alluvial plains we claim
to be ours from great-great-grandparents’ sins,
justifying — forgiving — forgetting—
to look back to where I’m told we have come—
as documented? — who can remember?
and see the gray silo I was born to,
two-tone-faded — aged — not yet colorized,
on a ticky-tack suburban cul-de-sac,
and find myself here, in a blue silo,
full of kernels of truth and deep belief
about belief, and wonder
how far removed I am from red,
and how we got so far apart.
Silos full of grain. Empty silos, full
of pain and other kinds of truth; broken
silos, crumbled, light streaming through the cracks,
people dreaming of green, open space
to live, to breath, be loved, and find
their true natal homes—
places from which we surely all have come.
How did we get here,
my neighbors into theirs, red,
my partner and I into ours, blue?
We were all born in black-n-white silos.
We painted them red. We painted them blue.
Now we paint them black
with division and despair.
If we get beyond our differences,
will we become Nowhere Men
with no point of view?
Are red ones filled with different grains from blue?
Grains of truth in husks of lies.
We must thresh.
Fine grain. Rough grain. Dry grain.
Cracked and sprouting grain.
Wet, rotted grain. Silage.
Digested. Fermented in bags.
In-forming. Shaping who we are
as we grow, age, ingrained in
silos red silos blue.
Media funnels our information,
but we can choose
what fills our silos.
We need green silos, NOW!
Glass houses lit
with crystalline sunshine,
golden green with life—
absorbing CO2
to save the sky.
How is a silo like a lighthouse?
—a cannon pointed at eternity
—a canon pointing out uncertainty
Swords to plowshares! Silos to lighthouses!
Beacons blending beliefs, rendering truths,
evolving biology, stores of information;
writhing, naked helixes in silo-bins,
red worms blue worms
educated, slurping culture-slime,
passing castings on to children, dies
to cast their new-worm bodies in our image.
I grew up in a black-n-white silo.
Now I am afraid of red silos; I’ve heard
the people in there are armed and alarmed,
that they think I am
what I really am:
an atheist, socialist, humanist,
scientist, feminist, drug addict, wimp;
that others in their blue silos
are female, lesbian, liberal, queer,
people of color, hedonists, vegan;
that we hate them (I don’t)
and so they hate who we are
and will kill us for being
who we are who I am.
My neighbor raised around the block from me
in a similar silo—now blood red:
FUCK YOUR FEELINGS plastered his walls
like a rural ad for tractors on a barn;
Let’s Go Brandon meaning
Fuck You Biden;
Stars & Stripes in black & blue
a Thin Blue Line,
of corporate troops in a race war;
I thought I could change my neighbor’s mind if I spoke
Truth to Power, but he had none;
that if I said the right words he’d change his mind—
and we could be as close as neighbors should—
but I feared his guns, and said nothing.
Now I must admit I wished him dead
to protect my love, myself, my elders,
family, my children, my friends, and be
the virtuous vanguard
of a Green Goon-squad.
I am ashamed.
So I hide in my blue silo
woke — asleep.
How do we here know our truth is true—
and not the vagaries of belief?
How are we so sure?
Let me count the ways:
They have Holy Scripture, God-received Laws,
Devine Inspiration, Creation, Faith;
we have senses, communication, facts,
hypotheses, procedures, conclusions,
debate, theory, application, and proof.
—The Political Rainbow—
From red into purple to blue into
gold into green back to yellow and blue
through to purple and red again, fading
in time and mind to black-n-white.
Our black-n-white silo had Walter Cronkite,
Huntley/Brinkley, and Johnnie Carson
to tell us what was Truth and what was not.
Cronkite made me think Captain Kangaroo
was behind the news
because they were both on CBS.
Huntley/Brinkley brought me Beethoven
with their intro from the Ninth Symphony.
It took years to separate slashing strings
and timpani from images of war,
to uncouple Uncle Walter from the Captain’s Puffin’ Billie.
Neither sorting-out completed.
Johnnie lived in the dark magic hour
when I was thought to be in bed, asleep.
Glittering, scary glimpses from a boyish grin,
watched secretly from my Childhood silo
through a door,
cracked-open.
Silos, echo chambers, confirmation
bias-bubbles, by their nature isolate us;
Schrödinger’s cats, only self-aware,
we know we may be both alive and dead
but not seeing our Other, quantum selves,
don’t know which we are. Everyone assumes
they and their silo to be the truer version.
We don’t have Lennon’s glass onion to see
how the other half lives and finds the truth.
Our Red Silo is safe.
Protected.
We are armed.
Our Red Silo is a smokestack
makes us strong.
We have freedom from fear.
Our Blue Silo is smart.
Well informed.
We know things.
Our Blue Silo’s a library
all is taught.
We have freedom to love.
OUR BLUE SILO
Our blue silo
has an infinite zenith.
I can see the edge of the universe from our porch.
It will take forever to get there, even longer
with this latest crushing blow
to the world’s collective soul.
In the meantime,
Our blue silo
has hot running water,
a new septic tank with a cute blue cap,
a garage, driveway, and stainless-steel fridge
with food and drink from the North Coast Co-op.
Our power comes from infinity, too—
Our silo’s cozy warmth flows from a pump
driven by twelve black light-drinking panels
lined up edge to edge on our composite
tar-shingled roof, glass bodies in the sun,
our foundation built of other bodies;
immigrants forced by hands seen and unseen
hands with weapons, arms of false affection
bodies lined up head to foot, hip to hip
in the bellies of banal prison-ships—
Trafalga — Hermose — Guerrero — Brooks,
bound, brood-bred, gaslit, and sold,
while others here — as there — and everywhere
women children elders
Renewing the World
on Tulowat Island
cudgeled in murder-ceremonies
by the drunken priests of Christ’s holy greed
prancing around the reddening sacred ground
with whiskey jugs — axes — clubs
all to a snappy reel of Dixie.
Our Blue Silo also has a view!
a tube of filtered light—no longer black-n-white—
that speaks to us,
watches us watching, hears us listening
feeds us rations of bull and chicken-shit
until we’re full of it and empty blind
and blinded to the musky star-link cloud
that streaks across our opening above,
blurring out stars, a skid-mark on the night,
deaf and deafened to the distant booming
fire growing nearer every day.
My inner silo has an exit
I would rather not use,
though everyone knows in time they must.
I tried to escape through the lighted tube
but was caught in a web of looping roundabouts,
mocking lemniscates,
that brought me back to terminal, digital comfort.
Desperate to be nearer to the zenith, I climbed the walls
but got no closer to the sky.
I fell.
Thank you, love,
for bringing me back home.
This time I’ll keep my eyes on the zenith,
close them when the star-link monster screams,
fix my heart-mind on the starry circle,
and sing full-voiced so my song might make it out,
soft to you of love, and of our children
in their greener
more transparent
silos in the sun
and hope to share this place without complacence
through all the time we may still have as one.