- This poem I wrote expresses how I often feel these days:
“Seeking Solace” by Denise Galang
Each day, I despair over the state of the union, the nationalistic terrorists who spread hate and intolerance - a president and senators who are controlled by lobbyists and capital rather than ethics and empathy.
More people killed in mass shootings.
More people losing homes, power, possessions, security to severe weather.
More and more the divide between the have and have-nots grows. More and more homeless people. My son cries when we do not give to the beggars on Prospect Ave, asking “why don’t more people give them money?” Meanwhile, more and more luxury condos are being built on every block.
More and more walls are being built, increasing ignorance and isolationism. Instead, we the people should be replacing bricks with books, building our understanding of people and cultures of all time periods and all nations, studying her and his stories, building understanding and community.
Each day, I seek strength and hope, recharge my soul with:
The presence and pulse of my family, friends, and puppy, valuing the living,
Music playing through my phone or car radio,
The sun and moon rising and setting,
New culinary concoctions,
Diabetic supplies covered by insurance that help keep me alive and healthy,
Poetry, novels, articles, editorials that inspire and inform me,
Citizens, civilians, visitors, foreigners, immigrants, wanderers - we are all daughters and sons, siblings, neighbors, friends, co-workers, we are the people who must act each day to be kind and just, regardless of political party or religious affiliations.
II.
Here is a myriad of texts that have recently helped me better understand, tolerate, and find joy in the world:
I was introduced to Gerard Manley Hopkins in college by my poetry teacher, Donna Masini. Since then, I have memorized several of his poems, finding such energy, passion, and comfort in his verse.
Carrion Comfort
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
2. I came across Safia Elhillo on Button Poetry, a channel on YouTube that has wonderful contemporary poets reading their work:
3. This is the sexiest and most empowering poem I have ever read:
“Center of the World” by Safiya Sinclair
The meek inherit nothing.
God in his tattered coat
this morning, a quiet tongue
in my ear, begging for alms,
cold hands reaching up my skirt.
Little lamb, paupered flock,
bless my black tea with tears.
I have shorn your golden
fleece, worn vast spools
of white lace, glittering jacquard,
gilded fig leaves, jeweled dust
on my skin. Cornsilk hair
in my hems. I have milked
the stout beast of what you call America;
and wear your men across my chest
like furs. Stick-pin fox and snow
blue chinchilla: They too came
to nibble at my door,
the soft pink tangles I trap
them in. Dear watchers in the shadows,
dear thick-thighed fiends. At ease,
please. Tell the hounds who undress
me with their eyes—I have nothing
to hide. I will spread myself
wide. Here, a flash of muscle. Here,
some blood in the hunt. Now the center
of the world: my incandescent cunt.
All hail the dark blooms of amaryllis
and the wild pink Damascus,
my sweet Aphrodite unfolding
in the kink. All hail hot jasmine
in the night; thick syrup
in your mouth, forked dagger
on my tongue. Legions at my heel.
Here at the world’s red mecca,
kneel. Here Eden, here Bethlehem,
here in the cradle of Thebes,
a towering sphinx roams the garden,
her wet dawn devouring.
4. The title of the following article speaks to me. Poetry is a peaceful weapon against injustice and ignorance. I love all of the works that Edwidge Danticat references. And I love the picture of Audre Lorde, a writer I have always admired.
Poetry in a Time of Protest By Edwidge Danticat
Published in New Yorker magazine, January 31, 2017
The poet and activist Audre Lorde.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT ALEXANDER / GETTY
The day that Donald Trump was sworn in as President of the United States, I went to hear the Alabama-based poet Ashley M. Jones read from her book “Magic City Gospel” at my local bookstore in Miami, a city that is home to one of the largest foreign-born populations in the United States. In his inaugural speech, Trump had repeatedly invoked “the people,” and said, “And this, the United States of America, is your country,” but it was hard to believe that he meant to include my black and brown neighbors, friends, and family, many of whom came to America as immigrants. Trump’s speech was dark, rancorous, unnuanced. Afterward, I wanted to fall into a poet’s carefully crafted, insightful, and at times elegiac words.
At the bookstore, I listened as Jones read a poem about seeing a Ku Klux Klan uniform on display at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
Behind the glass,
it seems frozen, waiting
for summer night
to melt it into action . . .
Jones also read a poem about Sally Hemings, the woman who was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson, the father of six of her children. And Jones read haikus about the 1963 Birmingham Children’s Crusade, in which dogs were unleashed and fire hoses were used as weapons against young people, six years and older, who were marching for their rights.
Political language, like poetry, is rarely uttered without intention. When Trump said, unconvincingly in his speech, that “we are one nation, and their pain is our pain,” I knew that the They was Us, this separate America, which he continually labels and addresses as Other. “Their dreams are our dreams,” he added. To which I could hear the eternal bard of Harlem, Langston Hughes, shout from his grave, “What happens to a dream deferred?” or “I, too, am America.”
The late Gwendolyn Brooks, a Chicagoan and the Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry in 1950, might have chimed in with “Speech to the Young,” a poem about one manner of resisting and what we now commonly call “self-care”:
Say to them,
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers,
"Even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night."
You will be right.
For that is the hard home-run.
Live not for battles won.
Live not for the-end-of-the-song.
Live in the along.
Looking to both living and dead poets for words of inspiration and guidance is now part of my living “in the along,” for however many years this particular “night” lasts.
One of the bonds that many people in my community now share is a deep fear about what might come next. Twelve years ago, after fleeing unrest in our native Haiti, my eighty-one-year-old uncle Joseph, a cancer survivor who spoke with a voice box, died in immigration custody after requesting asylum in this city. He had a valid visa and family members waiting for him, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him anyway. His medications were taken away, and when he fell ill he was accused of faking his condition. As his health worsened, he was taken to a local hospital’s prison’s ward, where he died shackled to a bed, five days after arriving in the United States. Still, in later years I took some small comfort in the fact that Miami was generally considered a “sanctuary” city, where undocumented immigrants were not routinely turned over to the federal government for deportation. I also kept believing that our numbers, not to mention our vital economic, cultural, and political contributions to the city, would continue to protect all of those who call Miami home.
Only a week into the Trump Presidency, we learned that we were wrong. On Sunday, dozens of us rallied in front of Miami International Airport, where my uncle was first detained, to protest Trump’s executive order barring all refugees, particularly those from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Since Trump’s xenophobic order was issued, the potential for my family’s nightmare to be repeated in the lives of other refugees and asylum seekers has increased considerably, particularly for those who are fleeing situations in which waiting even one more day can be a matter of life and death.
At the airport rally, we carried signs that denounced the ban, but our presence also highlighted the erosion of civil liberties for people of color, Native Americans, women, L.G.B.T.Q. people, immigrants, and even journalists. One man carried a sign that, like mine, said, “No Human Being Is Illegal.” A woman held one that read, “Immigrants Are America’s Ghostwriters.” Another woman had simply scribbled on a piece of cardboard, in all caps, the word “No.”
We shouted slogans like “No ban, no wall!” and “When black and brown bodies are under attack, what do we do? / Stand up, fight back! / When Muslims and women are under attack, what do we do? / Stand up, fight back!”
We condemned the mayor of Miami-Dade County, Carlos Giménez, who was the first to fall in line behind one of Trump’s earlier executive orders threatening to withdraw funds from sanctuary cities that refused to act as an arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We denounced Senator Marco Rubio, a former political rival of Trump, who now wants to join him in building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Without community, there is no liberation,” the poet and activist Audre Lorde wrote, nearly thirty-five years ago. In our rallying and marching, we rediscovered community in one another.
Throughout the rally, because I seek solace in words, my thoughts kept returning not just to my beloved uncle but also to Jones, Hughes, and Brooks, whose 1971 ode to the singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson echoes the words in our chants:
. . . we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.
I also kept returning to Lorde, who wrote that “poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.”
Poetry, she said, is how we name the nameless. “It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
Stripped of our usual bearings and sanctuaries, we must now decide on a daily basis what our tangible actions will be.
5. There are so many amazing female vocalists that I have recently encountered and fallen in love with:
Danay Suarez is a Cuban rapper. Here are the lyrics to one of her songs and a link to her video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqLhLDbm0d8&feature=youtu.be
Yo Aprendí
Yo aprendí que la mayoría de las veces
Las cosas no son lo que parecen
Que somos una especie, que se especializa en mentir
Para así construir un porvenir con mentiras
Cuenta cuantas veces hacemos desaparecer
Con solo una frase lo que no quisiéramos perder
Se nos va la vida, estamos dejando correr
El tren con el amor, que solo pasa una vez
Yo aprendí a no burlarme de nadie con arrogancia
Por que yo no se cuales serán mis circunstancias
Y la elegancia, solo es cosa de ego
La ropa con la que mejor me veo
Es la del alma
Yo aprendí que la karma es buena consejera
A la hora de tomar decisiones certeras
Que yo no soy la maldita
Pero con el oportunista debo ser una fiera
Yo se que uno se puede equivocar
Como un ser humano normal
Que tiene mucho valor que de perdones
Pero mas perdonar
Que no se puede pisotear la palabra
Pisotear la moral
Que el amor no basta cuando el respeto no alcanza
Es como arar en el mar
No soy mejor que nadie, nadie es mejor que yo
Aunque yo no entienda como todos quieren parecerse
Como la gente se clona, pierde su propia voz
Y no saben a donde caminar al levantarse
Yo aprendí que el querer saber todo lo que piensan con respecto a mi
Es se-mi amenaza, es abrirle la puerta
A la envidia, decirle "¿Como esta señora?
Entre esta en su casa"
Que pasan las cosas, pero los errores pesan
Por que luego se arrastran, por que luego te aplastan, como cadenas del alma
Yo se como se extrañar a un hermano
Cuando te hace falta
Yo se que a veces el que mas sufre
Es el que mas te ama
Yo se que tendré otra madrugada donde no tenga ni almohada
Ya yo comprendí que la vida es linda, pero no es un cuento de hadas
Yo se que uno se puede equivocar
Como un ser humano normal
Que tiene mucho valor que de perdones
Pero mas perdonar
Que no se puede pisotear la palabra
Pisotear la moral
Que el amor no basta cuando el respeto no alcanza
Es como arar en el mar
Songwriters: Danay Suarez Fernandez
Ana Tijoux is a Chilean rapper whose songs cross all borders and show the need for unity.
“Somos Sur”
***
What poems, songs, stories, and other texts are keeping you calm and helping you through the daily storms of life? Please share in the comments section below.
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