HASTINGS
Hastings Street is so much more than a continent:
The smells are the smells of a town faraway, one like yours, like mine, like everyone’s.
It stinks like the hatred of the government that administers its filth.
Hastings, I pass along her everyday, so as not to forget her face –
—I measure my steps slowly along her garment—
I want to see her always through the height and breadth of her body
Curled up, with her mouth closed, waiting for them to speak to her or to shut their eyes
She doesn’t say anything, but she’s alert.
I scream to her face, broken with marijuana and crack,
Lost in dreams of coke and paradises of heroin that are not hers.
Ay! Hastings, everyone’s scandal
No one can say that they have nothing to do with what happens,
They can say they haven’t seen it, but they can’t say that they do not know.
Hastings – why are you always the place of the forgotten ones?
Sanctuary of the condemned, people murdered by the rules,
Laws and regulations that are given out at the food bank,
Handouts from Welfare, a bus ticket, the philanthropists’ lunch
Spoils of the drug dealers and the functionaries who administer vice and misery.
Lives thrown away in needles into the gutter:
Shock oozing pus,
Smell of shit, of despair, of compassion, of losing it all,
And somehow, never by accident, of tenderness.
In Hastings statistics never drop by, they never visit this corner
I was looking everywhere for my indigenous brothers (and sisters) of pain and blood
And I came upon them on the sidewalk and they did not know me:
Their struggle and their future tied up in making sure they have their next fix.
These ones, (my beloved), drag their rotten colours and faces and skin,
It doesn’t matter their sex, their age or how many years their bodies have birthed
And they measure, without knowing it, the price of a bit of drugs, cheap and murderous.
Here dogs don’t bark, but rather weep in pain for them.
For those who wonder why we don’t give up,
Hastings is, more than anything, a building up of fury,
Memory that feeds a fist made of dignity
A path which speaks the future that I don’t want
Horizon against which I have armed my strength.
Enough! If we’re all going to die, no more lying down in silence,
Let this wretched poverty rebel
Because nothing is free and there will be overdoses in order to clean the streets
As the Olympic year hovers over the business district.
Hastings is not hope’s grave,
It is so that we won’t forget
—and why not say it— it is the colour of my fear and my shame.
Raul Gatica
Vancouver, B.C.
November 1, 2005