EcoTheo Social Justice | Autumn 2020 Folio

(Tocantins – Brazil, 1990)

At four-twenty-four in the afternoon, the five dogs in the hard-packed dirt farm-yard were oblivious to the political meeting going on inside, not seeming to care whether the Workers’ Party won or not. Two of them, indeed, remained oblivious to everything but their own dreams – rolled up fast asleep in separate, dust-brown balls, lying on the hard red dirt like figures in an abstract painting.

It is the silence before and after protests that finds me unable to speak. What we fail to
say and what we didn’t say is the difference between now and then. If we say Black
Lives Matter and then someone says – All Lives Matter, is this clarity or a response
to not being picked at a basketball pickup game? Language doesn’t tie our hands
instead it ties our minds. We like to speak a certain way because we think it gives us
sight but at times it blinds us. Black Lives Matter is a conversation with Ralph
Ellison about the invisibility of blackness. It’s being in the middle of America and
having someone step over you as if you were property (again). A knee on a neck
is no different than a foot on a chair. Do the math. Count the years.
Take a photo of the evidence-the equation that never seems to capture our equality.
People see a flag and don’t see slavery. People see gray and think it’s the essence of whiteness. Change requires for us to no longer be speechless. What comes with the freedom of my tongue? Better yet – what does freedom taste like. Why the constant hunger? And what will quench my thirst?

Blades open the earth, with a smell
like blood or bread rubbed to crumbs.

News of my darkening country has me
thinking of poets slaughtered by tyrants,

of Mandelshtam, Lorca, Miklós Radnóti,
and poems from prison and from exile,

Nâzım Hikmet, Liao Yiwu, Dennis Brutus.
Their arrest warrants cringe for shame of the same

graceless brute’s signature. The punctured walls
close their eyes and brace for another wave of lead.

Come summer, when the cornfield simmers
in braided tassels, would I dare unravel myself,

as a beaten book frees letters from its pages,
or the flossy, seeded syllables of milkweed fluff.

Don’t lie, I want to shout at someone, torture is
never for information, always for the pleasure

of the torturer, or to stamp the state on a body,
which is the same thing. Then a raw gust

tosses gulls above the plowed furrows
where they have come to pluck

small soft bodies, and shrieking
they hold themselves stiffly in place,

beating against the wind, working
hard not to be blown backward.

For John Lewis

This Artemis country, helping deliver you
With a lead pipe, baseball bat, and a kick
To the ribs like response to your kicking
From 20 to 24 weeks old in a stomach,
In awe of what exactly? You recalled
Pandora’s box with sickness, death, racism,
And trouble—had a little good in it, the little
Enough to anger, stir up by sinking soup
From your hands, instead of a silver spoon
The country forgot while feeding you
At the blacks-only counter. It sounded like
It was raining through the wall,
Fiskite, but that must be the water
Heater of your apartment, 80 stories high—
Mine is in the closet and must trouble someone
Else—trouble with the little good in it, little
Enough for neighbors to hear me destroy
The smut from outside, leaving my brown skin.

“The deaths of two Saudi sisters…
discovered on the banks of New York’s Hudson River…
a double suicide” CNN 10/29/18

Together. Our thin-
lipped secrets protecting
the dead and the living, the ones who did not
protect us, never will. We have measured and cut
the rope, tied it around our bared necks. Pulled the strands taut.
There is no truth in the telling, no telling in the truth that tightens
into this noose. Will you dangle here with me?
I with you?
This is the sisterhood we dreamed
and feared,
but, wait,
over there is

the small jutting pier at Riverside Park, and there the two
Saudi Arabian sisters. See. They are duck-tapped together
at ankles and wrists. They have not
been long in the water. No one
suspects foul play. Look
how their dark curls
float about them.
       There is time. Is there
time? There is.
Let us cut our own
Is there time? There is        despair
    Is there?
       and save them. Here is

Is there?    the knife.
Do it now.

They believe the world can be good, so I tap
the car horn and raise a fist in solidarity
with the six or seven teenagers, all of them
white, in T-shirts and shorts, gathered safely

on the corner by the hardware, each holding
a hand-lettered, cardboard sign: Equality Now!,
or No Justice, No Peace, or a photograph
of the black man murdered down south by the forces

of order. A couple of them wave in response,
proud to be taking a stand, and I am nearly felled
by the intensity of what I must call love
and a cutting grief for their faith in all of us.

What do they expect will happen now?
They have never seen the grimy abattoirs
of the cities, and surely there is closer wrong,
always and even here, in our northern town

of a thousand souls, but I won’t let you call this
the self-regarding theatre of lovely gesture
or conclude that I am talking about futility.
People walk past. People drive past.

Customers go in and out of the hardware,
and the softest breeze of an early June afternoon
brushes the heat of the sun from the protesters’
pale legs, from arms yet untanned after the chill of spring.