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| AI graphic created by Nightcafé for The New Verse News |
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
—Czeslaw Milosz from "Dedication"
If I could write history with sparklers
in the newly dark air, light cherry bombs of truth, send bottle rockets
of lament to arc the unbelieving sky,
the sky that says: "Not this again!
Can't we just have a nice family meal without politics?"
I wonder, "Whose politics?" For the sake of 'peace', I cave.
"The hotdogs are ready. Who wants a hamburger?
Let's give thanks for the Founding Fathers' faith."
If God is holy, why did they enslave?
You whom I could not save.
I'm still the youngest, so experience doesn't count
though I've been married to a Black man for forty-five years.
What about 300 years of slavery?
Then decades of terror and Jim Crow?
Where does all that sorrow and anger go?
It bleeds into the bank accounts of Industry.
Broken Black and brown bodies pave the way.
"Now that's all behind us. Our future is bright."
"Yeah, for the land of the rich where some arefree."
Listen to me.
Silenced by inattention,
I am again the youngest at the family table.
"Did anyone bring that peach cobbler I crave?"
Why blame the victims with a little wave
so the flies of understanding never find landing?
A voice canonizes the Founding Fathers--it's my brother.
Most were slave holders,
who wrote that "all men were created equal."
My siblings channel the politics of my blue-blood mother,
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
By now, I'd settle for cap-gun sparks of recognition.
My husband, veteran of fireworks, stayed home from this failed mission.
He is a tired conscientious objector in this war.
Weary of the White noise of indifference, my grown children won't engage.
I write with sparklers, but I need a torch.
"Fireworks are beautiful, but they kill birds."
Land of the free. But how free, and who are 'we'?"
Heads together, they discuss the State of Things.
I love them, but this feels absurd.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
