There is no greater comfort
than knowing that your mother
is somewhere emanating warmth from her very pores,
in the home you’ve known since childhood,
as she slices open fresh pineapples
to have for summer dishes.
Or knowing that your sister
is just at arm’s length,
wrapped in the stained purple blanket
she never wanted to throw away,
watching her favorite animations.
Or knowing that for as long as you pleased
you could stay covered
under the veil of blue and familiar Carolina skies.
Never moving from the safety net of its piercing green gardens.
Always knowing that you have the option
of moving safely within a 5 mile radius of home,
forever.
Forgetting that safety
and comfort
never guaranteed survival for anyone.
when you are full of pain, you have no space to be powerful. this is why healing is crucial.
(via banaati)
The link isn’t working. :/http://www.sendspace.com/file/aqbwbl
fixed
(via ancestryinprogress)
Cascade - Ari Lennox
How did we get this high?
Fall into my cascade….
The Invocation: Courage in Cook County
(a late night/early morning draft)by aja monet
Downtown is behind us
and we’re driving up the Dan Ryan
to 63rd and Stewert where therein lies
a block of a building called, a school
just after the train tracks
I look out the window
from the passenger seat
to observe a refined man
the color of shimmering hooves,
the Sears Tower of the South side,
a chest congested bullet proof
as he sways his body,
waving cars around him,
a black gun hugs
off the right side of his hip
like a neglected child.
How something so fierce
and enraged
could still long to hold and be held,
I’m imagining the touch of a trigger before class.
Chicago is like I remembered her.
Shivering into corners
and tucking into sides.
My job, I’m told,
is to beautify your neighborhoods
with voices.
Voices more than violence,
more than statistics or figures in law books.
I walk into a noisy hall
of beige pants and navy shirts,
uniform teenagers.
The bell has rung and the deep azure blue lockers shut close.
I’m an invisible poet
with a hand full of books
and a mind mystified with exercises.
I’m reminded of that Saint
from the Church where Jody Williams
and I spoke the day before in Pilsen
to elementary kids about peace,
about peace in a Church
named after that patron Saint jude,
the saint of lost causes.
I enter Mr. Eldriges room
anticipating the mugs
of knowing-too-much-for-their-own-good children,
southern words creaking off their tongues like splintering wood-porches falling down the back of tenement buildings.
A room full of daughters and sons
that have seen far too many lost causes.
I ask the students to write
about where they are from,
not the place as in the city,
the neighborhood or street
but the sounds,
the smells,
the songs,
the people—
to describe for me their visions
of a life lived
as more than
an identity bracket.
They write poems,
open chest towards their desk
scribbling to the back drop of passing trains
outside the classroom window.
The trees lining the street are
just about naked as their hearts
spilling between the pages
and one girl reads her poem,
describes herself in third person.
“She is beautiful like charcoal potholes” says Lor.I smile at the Pulitzer prize worthy simile.
I survey the room for more voices:
“I hate it when I took out the garbage and saw them gun shells, but hey, that’s where I’m from..where Im from it feels like the twin towers cuz everything that’s black is considered a terrorist…Is it really me destroying my life or the people that don’t believe in me?”
The ambulance is her soundtrack
and I want to hush the world for a moment.Let us pray:
As we are placed into positions of authority,
may we remember our children,
all of our children, still children,
being tried as adults.
Children searching for their voices
between school bells and echoing sirens.
Children whom have seen or known
someone that has died far too young.
May we recognize the collective
in every decision we make,
to be reminded of the many
faces that compose our communities
and therein those whom are directly
affected by our successes and our failures.
May we be transformed and renewed each day.
May we invest in our bettering,
in methods of transforming
personal agendas into social politics.
Let us not forget to be human
in our efforts to be great,
in our efforts to be less than great.
We have all chosen
to participate in a society
that recognizes
the bootstraps and the bootless.
May we reach into our hearts
deeply and diligently,
each day,
with love and wisdom.
May we work towards a vision.
An ultimate goal.
A county of liberated children
and parents that live to love them..
Of fluid neighborhoods and healthy communities.
May we invest in our futures.
May we invest in prevention.
In programs and schools.
May we invest.
May we collaborate with each other
more and more, set aside our egos.May we gravitate towards the light
inside us,
to be reminded of our humanity
in a world where violence is learned,
is taught by example,
may we lead by example.
May we learn that silence, too,
is also a form of violence,
may we always give voice to the voiceless.
May we shift our cultures
into creations more than legislation,
to protect and provide.
To serve, always, to serve
that feeling entity within,
no matter how weathered and withered
by the beuracracy of a past.
No matter, no matter.
May we forge into our imaginations
for a brilliant future.
May we remember people as stories,
people as people,
and all the countless victims
of this system striving
and struggling each day
to maneuver the laws we set forth.
Here is a poet’s prayer,
a prayer that magnifies
our people and not our complaints,
that calls on our weaknesses
so we may work towards our strengths.
May we be responsible and accountable
to each other.
May we be remembered
or else forgotten
for our support of “lost causes.”
No more jails. No more jails. No more.
May we deal with the root of our crimes
and not the symptoms of its manifestations.
May we recognize crime as a disease.
May we all be cured.
Everything is converging.
It is not happening within another world.
It is happening within us.
May we seek truth. More truth.
May we learn the art of listening,
the magic made of intently hearing.
May we cease the need to govern
our schools and neighborhoods with guns.Have you ever felt the static of graves?
A body of windows,
flesh remembered by air?
There is more to know
than the tears can tell us
more to feel
than the bruise
or the open wound.
What song will you sing by a grave
like the rain catching your skin
and the wind between your toes?
What beauty will we offer our past?
What ethics?
What moral courage?May we be courageous. May we be courageous.
May we be courageous. May we be courage.Like a 13 year old pumpkin-brown boy
in Cook County Juvenile Detention Center
who looks me dead straight in the eyes
and tells me how he saw his father
die at age 9
in a poem.
May we be courageous.
May we be courageous.
May we be courageous.
- Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
- Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
- Aurora Levins Morales’s Radical Pleasure: Sex and the End of Victimhood
- bell hooks’ Cultural Criticism & Transformation
- Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses
- Combahee River Collective Statement
- Dorothy Allison’s A Question of Class
- Judith Butler documentary
- Leslie Feinberg’s We Are All Works in Progress
- Paula Gunn Allen’s Who is Your Mother?: Red Roots of White Feminism
- R.W. Connell’s The Social Organization of Masculinity
- Sandra Lee Bartky’s Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power
- Sandra Cisneros’s Guadalupe the Sex Goddess
- Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman?
- Susan Bordo’s The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity
(Source: aloofshahbanou, via browndenim)
“drugs comin’ into ma community
weapons comin’ into ma community
durrr-ty cops in ma community
& you keep saying that i”m free?”
Song of the Day: Turntable Tuesday (5/7/13)
Song: Do You Have Time
Artist: THEESatisfaction
Album: Transitions
The lovely ladies of THEESatisfaction are a definite favorite us at NWHH. Their last show with Shabazz Palaces was tonight and they’ll be doing a string of shows across the pond in Europe. They’ll be playing at Sub Pop’s Silver Jubilee Festival on July 13th along with many other of your favorite acts for free. Until then, you can make some time for this dope track. Get it here.
(via banaati)
