We Speak of Our Comrade

This poem was written in 2004, at the request of Andrew Wood, for a fundraiser at El Rio. We has just learned that our good friend Eric Quezada was battling cancer. 
 
 
We Speak of Our Comrade In Present TenseFor Eric Quezada
We dance tonight
because
what's really important
about our friend
is bigger than the debates,
or the theory,
or the practice,
or the ideology,
or the long meetings
or the demonstrations,
the party,
the principles,
you just remember that
today is a very good day
because you speak of
a comrade still very much
in the present tense.

You can think of a friend
who stayed awake at night
as his community nearly broke
under the feather weight of
of another eviction notice.

You think of socialism of the soul
a man
who cried upon witnessing
witnessing Afro-Latino hands
control their own destiny in Cuba.

Sometimes I think when he dreams
he dreams of a futbol match
where only the Third World wins,
and the faces that have been sitting on
the sidelines decide to get in the game once and for all. 

If the Board of Supervisors ever quit
and take all the cruddy bureaucrats with them,
the people know exactly how to run their city
then suddenly all of Eric's words about
careful strategy and base-building
will take on new meaning.

Eric is a teacher who has the entire neighborhood
as a classroom
like all of the best teachers he knows
that the most important lessons are these-

History isn't over with yet.
Privilege plus capital doesn't always equal displacement
if the people upset the equation.

Yet we cannot ever face our fears
only in political terms
because Eric's work is
the poetry written on the face
of the ones that love him

His smile is a Giants game back when
the yuppies still had to drive by
the projects to see one.

The humble work of
awakening people to the power
of their own hands of the strength
of their own people is done quietly
by Eric yet it is also louder
than Afro-Latin beats
blasted down
Valencia Street
Mission Street
Harrison Street
Bryant Street
and back again.

Let the neighborhood know
that today is a very good day
because we speak of our comrade
in present tense.

-James Tracy, 2004

 

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