DROP BY DROP

This is the second of two poems written as a meditation on Che Guevara, the Argentinian who became a famous revolutionary in Cuba in the early 1960s with Fidel Castro. This meditation also examines, briefly and succinctly, as poetry does so well, the nature of the war, the battle, the revolution, that is the experience of one international pioneer in the Baha’i community in this first century of the Formative Age. We all fight such different battles and, inevitably, we fight them alone. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 25 May 1999.

My task was to acquire the gun and the sword
of a virtuous character and, like you,1
I will give all I have to get it.2 I’ve got a vision
of where I’m going in much more detail than
you ever had. But the blood I give is sucked out
drop by drop, unseen, unknown, undiscussed.
No overthrow of regimes in my war, no planned
takeovers, no coups, no training in the techniques
of revolution, no guerilla warfare, no tracking through
the jungle but, in the end, an attack on the armies
of the world, their right and left wings, the legions
of all the nations, carrying the attack to the centre
of the powers of the earth and one day I, too,
will die in a town having given my soul for a Cause,
my portion of weeping and my endless words which
like a deadly poison accompany me in this arid exile.3

Ron Price
25 May 1999

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1 Che Guevara, revolutionary hero of guerilla warfare in Cuba in the early 1960s.
2 He was killed in 1967 in Bolivia, by Bolivian troops, trying to initiate the global revolution which he believed in and which he hoped would begin for Latin America in Bolivia. He became a martyr to left-wing students in many nations.
3 there are aspects of the experience that are rich and rewarding; and others which are arid and discouraging.

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For anyone who likes Che, there is book by Huberto Fontava that is a must read.

I’ve also read ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ and Che biography by Jon Lee Anderson before Fontava’s book.  The ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ is well written, while the Che biography was too long.

The first day of my pioneering-travel-teaching life was 1 September 1962, although I could take that life back to about August 20th 1962 when I left Burlington to go to a Baha’i camp at Kashabog near Peterborough in northern Ontario. I was eighteen and I was about to start my matriculation year at high school. The world was warming up to the Cuban Missile Crisis the following month not that I gave it much thought, immersed as I was in a new school, a new town and nine matriculation subjects on the horizon. Cuba and Havana was all about cigars, but the politics of it all remained in those my aolescent years far far on the periphery of my life.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 1 September 1992.
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To place Cuba, that missile crisis and those Havana cigars in a wider and, I hope, more rlevant perspective, let me add the following prose-poem:
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                              BRINK OF DISASTER

In that same year of 1962 when my ife was bright and ealry, Katherine Anne Porter published her only novel Ship of Fools. She was 72. It made her rich and famous. Porter tried in this book to recreate the atmosphere of a world on the brink of disaster. In October 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis the world certainly was and, some argue, about as close as we have ever got to total wipe out.  In April 1957 the then leader of the Baha’i community wrote that the world was “hovering on the brink of self-destruction” and so it had been throughout the 1950s with the A-bomb behind the lives of all of us as we all tried to get on with our lives as if nothing had changed.  In September 1962 I began my pioneering-travel teaching life in this world which Porter saw in very harsh, bleak, terms. A world which had just experienced in the two previous generations two wars of such daemonic force was, to Porter, weak and evil. Porter disliked the human species and she saw the established order as disintegrating. -Ron Price with thanks to Alfred Kazim, Bright Book of Life, Little, Brown and co., Boston, 1971, p. 169.

It was a difficult time to begin
this journey, just at the edge
of the final stage of history.
But I had no idea of just where
we were at. I was too busy getting
in and through university, dealing
with the first stage of my manic—
depression and feeling the insistent
surge of hormones mixing the pot
during world crises which, for the
most part, only existed in my world
on TV, the radio, in those newspapers
on the couch which my dad still read.

My world had a different darkness then,
kept me on the edge fighting demons:
no calm, coolness or silent grass-growing
mood in which I could compose—not then.
The laborious uphill work had begun;
I had not found my line, my art, my basis
for constant toil and labour, ceaseless
comprehension of difficulties, ceaseless—
except of course for sex, drugs and R&R.

Ron Price
30 October 2003