Gaza is starved, beaten, bombed, and trapped,
Haiti is sabotaged, poisoned, violated,
the “civilized world” moves swiftly past the dark shadow it casts.
A pale face is bloodied, a European screams,
the white world erupts,
In chaotic fury and culpable tears they don their blue and white or yellow,
and scream “justice!”
and decry “savagery!”
and type “terrorists!”
the white world trembles, death is her blanket
They mobilize funds and pass bills and sail warships and buy commercials,
because the white world is well-funded.
And we could laugh if their ignorance did not deal death, if the house did not always seem to have the odds on its side.
And we might rage both out loud and inside, our souls reeling to maintain dignity and not spread the hateful disease they spawned.
And we do cry for ours, for others,
for the slow or fast deaths of “cleansing” people and places.
the white world wails, blood soothes his throat
WE know this “civilization”
And their claims of innocence,
that put our uncles, sisters, children at the end of a rope,
or bed of a creek,
or fleeing north for slower death.
We have have seen them tremble at our humanity,
their fear hiding behind a badge and a hood and a dome,
their bloodlust cloaked in “trials” or “wars”.
the white world mourns, phosphorus and fire returns their smiles
And it is WE who endure their fairytale of civilization,
clutching our songs, our foods, our joys, our children,
with a love that knows loss.
We stand, dance, preach — resilient and maimed.
We talk of “resistance” and the “work” and the “struggle”,
And our struggle might be at the keyboard, the community meeting, the downtown plaza, the legislative halls, or the unionized workplace, or the warmongers door,
BUT someones somewhere will probably have to stock their resistance with missiles aimed at colonization.
and who are we to judge
If resistance does not resist, our decolonization may remain a metaphor, a wisp of a dream in our descendants’ sleepless nights.
If liberation cannot be grasped with our full hearts and hands,
let it at least be nightmare in the minds of oppressors,
let it shake their deluded supremacy at its roots,
let it expose their civilization for the hollow shell of humanity that it has always been,
let it fill their conscience with fears of retribution,
That they may never know peace in this world or the next,
just as others have lived under threat of warning sirens, or lynch mobs, or no-knock raids, or indefinite detentions.
May Gaza and Haiti and Mississippi and Congo live
to see a new world emerge, take root, and blossom.
May their siblings join them and rejoice,
for we celebrate not death, but the crumbling of a centuries-long sadistic fantasy.
We celebrate the world that wants to be,
where humanity rejoins God, the Earth, and their children,
where peace is an act of justice and honor,
where life is affirmed without exception.
—
Glory to the ancestors!
Glory to the martyrs!
Free the people!
Free the land!
Palestine will live forever!