SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
If I am judged
If I am punished
If I am dismissed
If I am misunderstood
If I am celebrated
If I am envied
If I am competed with
If I am slandered against
If I am seen
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
My Black heroes don’t drop names like Fendi Gucchi Prada
My Black sheroes rock afros like Angela Davis and Assata
But my sheroes are more than a trend and they’re bigger than a hairstyle
for Alton Sterling, Andrew Loku, Philando Castile, et al.
I wanna live, son. But which son are you?
There where the rivers are made
of moonshine and the lights still wait,
i twist and gasp
open and close my mouth
searching for air
whenever a sturgeon is caught in the rainy river
i know
the feel of strange hands touching my body
the struggle
take the moon
nd take a star
when you don’t
know who you are
paint the picture in your hand
nd roll on home
take my fear
nd take the hunger
take my body
Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, oppressed;
O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,
Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.
As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
Down a long, long corridor
I keep walking…
—A window straight ahead so bright it hurts the eyes,
creation stories are lullabies for grown-ups
they remind us of all the possible ways & means
that worlds…
i am writing to tell you
that yes, indeed,
we have noticed
60s pulled us from starvation into government jobs
antiquated Indians in Saskatchewan danced for rain
Manitoba Indian doings were hidden for a jealous
— so we said to the somewhat: Be born —
& the shadow kept arriving in segments,
cold currents pushed minerals
the re-invention of oneself
through the tongues of whispering mountains
the re-arrangement of the universe
Here at Woodlands, Moriah,
these thirty-five years later,
still I could smell her fear.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke,
And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena,
And the skid-roads blind, and never a look
In my body flows the blood of Gallic
Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle
ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.
wandering to the other, wandering
the spiritual realities, skilled in all
ways of contending, he did not search
Where there’s a wall
there’s a way through a
gate or door. There’s even
Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps…
If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,
bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room
with twelve locks on the door.
Constantly risking absurdity
…
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
About me the night moonless wimples the mountains
wraps ocean land …
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
I.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into…
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my Gates,
And my divine Althea brings
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
Come, my Celia, let us prove,
While we can, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever;
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —
This debt we pay to human guile;
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”
