These red raspberries won't leave my mind
even though I bought the black ones
from the woman at the market last Saturday.
The red ones I used to pick along the railroad tracks
Long summer days in June, orange plastic bowl in hand.
On Saturday, the sun was rising over the glitter gut ghetto.
I could hear a train in the distance--freight, no doubt.
Cross one street and the neighborhood changes.
Cross many streets, day after day, and you change
I would argue, for the better.
This is the safe part of town, not certified as deadly.
The neighborhood kids were setting off fireworks behind the dumpster last night.
I watched the sparkling fire from afar, mesmerized.
Surely they thought I was watching so they didn't set my house aflame.
I didn't correct them.
We keep our distance.
They're black.
I'm white.
Somewhere in the middle we must meet as gray
In those moments when color doesn't matter
When we're taking out the trash
Or walking the dogs
(Or setting off fireworks.)
Except my high school was never shut down for drug violence.
The State did not replace my teachers.
Police officers did not roam the halls. There were no metal detectors.
I went to one of the best high schools in the nation,
a blue ribbon school before blue became ubiquitous.
I know what good education looks like.
I want them to have that experience,
not out of pity,
but because I see the hunger in their eyes.
They know they are missing something,
They just don't know how to get it, or worse,
have accepted they never will.
I want them to have the education I had
because I want them to shape the nation.
I want their freestyle to write policy.
I want to learn from them.
There are 4 ways in which I am oppressed.
There are 624 ways in which I am privileged.
I listed them today on paper towel rolled out across the kitchen floor.
Even given the weighted average,
I sometimes lose my place along the roll.
Academic woes are a privilege.
It means I am not dying of pathogens in the mountains of Ethiopia
or dying of starvation in Somalia
or dying of AIDS in the US or England.
I remember watching our little black and white TV
the day they announced AIDS was linked to monkeys.
That same day I remember watching images from the Gulf War.
It was one of the last dinners I remember having with Mom.
People were dying everywhere. We were killing strangers we had never met.
We were allowing others to be killed.
How did this make sense?
History has seen so many changes,
time and time and time again.
Mother Nature holds history in the roots of the elm trees, in silty beds of the streams.
She tells stories, we can hear them if we listen closely.
I am a firm believer in the healing power of Nature.
I am a firm believer in our innate wisdom.
I am a firm believer in breaking down rationality and allowing ourselves to rest.
We are whole.
We are wise.
We are strong.
We are drilled in the opposite
from the day we learn to walk.
We must learn to rely on ourselves,
to rely on one another,
to rely on Mother Nature or whomever speaks to us in ways we understand.
We must find ways of understanding.
We must find ways of rejoicing with one another.
We must find ways
Back
To ourselves.
Fri Jul 06, 2012 12:25 pm
MysteryGirl Moderators
Joined: 02 Jun 2007
Posts: 3419
Location: I come from a land downunder
I am lost for words Eil... what wonderful sentiments, how beautiifully put...Im going to come back and read this again later and perhaps I will have a more specific comment. Well done.
HugZ, MG _________________ Be yourself.............everybody else is taken!
Fri Jul 06, 2012 11:24 pm
Eilidh Moderators
Joined: 09 Apr 2005
Posts: 1880
Thanks, MG.
My writing soul tore open sometime this week. This poem isn't the best thing I've ever written, but it came spewing forth all in one sitting, line after line in the way it appears on the page now. For that spontaneous continuity alone, I knew it was a keeper.
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