Arts Alive San Antonio

Today’s poem is by Austin-area writer and poet Milton Jordan, who, with his wife Anne Jordan, runs the Cypress Book Co. in Georgetown.

A Grammar of Good Trouble
By Milton Jordan

Have we grown comfortable with the language
of despair and the vocabulary
 of hopelessness we have now learned to use?
Is the renewed grammar of what’s possible
offering us a familiar structure
we’re no longer prepared to employ?

How easily we have composed critique
and lined out the limits of actions 
in our carefully patterned protest
against evils we so clearly describe.

Are we able to revise these efforts
when confronted by terminologies
of hope and open arenas where
good grammar could lead to good deeds
and good deeds to trouble, good trouble?