Tag: systemic racism

I can’t breathe

By Mary F. Lenox

 

I can’t breathe
the words said
written on a waste container
near the sidewalk

I wondered what other
unheard voices say
I can’t breathe

Dying fish of the sea
echo
I can’t breathe
as they
navigate through
plastic and oil invaders

Birds
call out
through polluted air
I can’t breathe

Children playing
in urban streets
for lack of space elsewhere
I can’t breathe

Rivers and streams
full of sewage from earthlings
scream
I can’t breathe

Shouting voices of people of color
grieving for relief
from all the ways oppressors
have tried to kill, destroy, eliminate
I can’t breathe

Yet
young and old around the world march and proclaim
No more!

We will not stand silently by
hearing those words
I can’t breathe

 

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Mary F. Lenox is a poet, writer, speaker, and educator.  She was a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the School of Library and Information Science where she served as dean for 12 years. She is the author of two books of poetry, Threads of Grace: Selected Poems (2015) and Riches of Life: Poems (2019). She resides in San Diego, California.

Photo credit: Tyler Merbler via a Creative Commons license.

An Accounting

By Dianne Wright

“What is poetry which does not save nations or people” – Czeslaw Milosz

 

of the knowns:

25 years, the age of Ahmaud Arbery, gunned down by
2 white men.
1 white man filmed the assault.
2 prosecutors recused themselves.
1 recused prosecutor recommended no charges.
0 charges brought against the shooters for 2 months.
0 people who came to his assistance as he ran for his
1 life.
0 weapons found on his innocent, dead body.
2 times I have walked uninvited in an unconstructed house with no consequences.

of the unknowns:

How many yards did Ahmaud run to escape the killers?
How many heard LeBron James say
“We’re literally hunted every day”?
Where is the violence? On the streets? In the hearts of white men and women?
What are the right questions to ask and who should be asking them?

How many white people will open their eyes to this mortal wound?
Rise up against it?
What’s the story going to be this time?
Am I doing enough showing? Or too much telling?
What would a poem look like that exhorts white people to action?

In the moral wilderness I see people running for
their lives while streetlights reflect the shiny
triggers of guns in pale hands and I
raise my cup to drink a glass of sparkling metaphors
but the bubbles blast my eyes, blind me to my own

culpability and failure to do the right thing.
If the function of freedom is to free someone else*
how many poems will it take
to take down white supremacy?
Is that poem a blunt instrument or a song?

 

Dianne Wright is a disabled poet and social justice activist who lives in the High Desert with her 2 cats.

Photo credit: Victoria Pickering via a Creative Commons license.

* From Toni Morrison’s 1979 Barnard Commencement Speech, “I Am Alarmed by the Willingness of Women to Enslave Other Women.”