Tag: Laura Martinez

We Must Resist

By Laura Martinez

 

Everything has changed

Nothing has changed

He is gone

Does that mean we no longer resist?

It “takes time” to undo what he has done

Does that mean we no longer resist?

As long as elected officials state “America is not a racist country”

We must resist

As long as there is voter suppression

We must resist

As long as my grandson lives in fear of driving while black

We must resist

As long as women and LGBTQ communities risk losing everything they have gained

We must resist

As long as those fleeing oppression and poverty are turned away at the Southern border

We must resist

As long as elected officials live in fear of he who is not really gone

We must resist.

As long as fear and conspiracy theories abound

We must resist.

No matter who is in the White House

WE MUST RESIST

 

Laura Martinez is a retired social worker. She has been involved in active resistance for more than fifty years and knows we must resist injustice no matter who is in the White House.

WE THE PEOPLE – “Protect Each Other”: this photograph taken by French and Senegalese artist Delphine Diallo and converted into an illustration by Shepard Fairey reminds us of the power of youth and the world we’re building around them. This image of 12-year-old Menelik, calling us to #ProtectEachOther, has been downloaded on Amplifier’s website and shared thousands of times.

I See You

By Laura Martinez

 

First you are “pollo”
chicken.
Then you are “illegal”
just so much contraband
or “alien”
strange creature from another place
to be feared.
Less than human.

I walk with you
through the streets of Nogales,
sit with you as you prepare
for your journey,
as you pray the rosary.

I see you in the desert
exhausted and thirsty,
and I see your haunted eyes
as you are detained, chained and
branded a “criminal.”
The smell of broken dreams
permeates the air.

You are a human being,
someone’s husband, mother,
daughter, son,
who lives, loves,
suffers, endures,
never deterred from the promise
of a better, safer life.

 

I am a retired social worker and volunteer with a local humanitarian aid group that supplies water to migrants in the desert. I also am with a local group that coordinates nationally to end the criminalization of migration. My poems have been published locally in the Tucson Weekly and Arizona Daily Star. I am a regular contributor to an online magazine, Downtown LA Life.

Photo credit: Jasper Nance via a Creative Commons license.