For the Young Men Who Died of AIDS

By: Julia Vinograd

The dead lovers are almost as beautiful
as razor-edged spaces in the air where they used to walk.
Do you remember his hand lazily playing
with the rim of a glass, making the ghost of a bell sound
for his own ghost, and the talk didn’t even pause?
The glass is whole. Break it; break it now.
Break everything.
How can people go on buying toothpaste
and planning their summer vacations?
Vegetables would care more.
The potato has a thousand eyes all mourning for the lovers
who lived in their deaths like a country
foreign to everywhere for a long time before dying.
A long time watching people look away.
The potato only met them under the earth
after their deaths and it still wept. And we do not.
The ghost bell makes barely a sound forever.
The dead lovers are still in love, but no one else is.
He took his hand with him, a grave is as good
as a briefcase to keep the essentials in:
a smile, bones, a way of biting his lip
just before looking into your eyes.
Shoulder blades cutting into summer like butter.
All the commuters in a rush hour traffic jam
are cursing because the lovers are dying
faster than their cars.
The child sent to bed without dinner cries
for the lovers, also sent to bed early and without.
Unfair. Throw the dishes against the wall. Break them.
The dead lovers are almost as beautiful
as when they were alive.
You can hear the rim of a glass
tolling for the ghosts to come home.
Break the glass, break the ghosts. Pull down the sky.
Break everything.
Dance on the fragments. Scream their names.
Get splinters of ghosts under your skin
torn and bleeding because it hurts,
because it hurts so bad.

While she was not explicitly political, Julia exemplifies the idea that an artist’s essential role is to reflect society back to itself, as expressed in her Pushcart Prize-winning poem, For The Young Men Who Died of AIDS. A constant presence at protests over free speech, Apartheid, People’s Park, the Iraq War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and more, she wrote from within decades of Bay Area activism. 

Read poet Rebecca Faust's commentary on For The Young Men Who Died of AIDS, here.  

Please help filmmaker Ken Paul Rosenthal complete the first cut of his independently produced documentary about Julia Vinograd by making a tax-deductible donation—in any amount—here. Watch the trailer and read more of Julia's poems, here.

You can find Julia’s works at www.Zeitgeist-Press.com along with many other great works from the Babarian poets.