'Silently or LOUD,'
The poetry of liberation goes bigfooting along,
crying out against the injustice it sees,
With lake-making footsteps as it marches
across the fading cityscape...
Crying against the injustice it SEES.
The tall tale giant of old who stepped through clearcut ground,
steps now block after block
Over pothole, failing bridge, eroding dike and the other
cracked and crooked concrete things
Built for a thousand years of empire and of art
Where were once displaced fields and rows
That themselves drained and felled and burned
and ploughed what was there before.
Even the most miserable tale of human horror--
The bodies of slain mothers stacked for burning with their children;
Which becomes for us a tale or scene
from which we recoil because we see it for what it is,
What it says about human beings and our unkind,
And the depths of shadow we are capable of denying
and therefore displaying--
Even that is but the gentlest of caresses
When held up before the actinic desert
sunlight of close examination of our
Work upon the land from which---and no where else
---it is possible for us to spring.
Shortgrass prairie, Hardwood forest, Savannah,
Tallgrass prairie, Woodland, Wetland...
Abstract words for acres of ground more particular
than the tiniest points upon a map,
Each one mottled and articulate as any person;
(that too, an abstract word capable of displacing
or distancing from our awareness
the expressions and tones of voice and manners
of the people we call our friends and neighbors)
Each one a fractal rose---living beings encompassing
living beings, composing living beings---
Invisible to us in our acts of commerce, settlement,
of going to, of coming from,
Or even of picnicking on an idle weekend afternoon
under a sun we hardly see.
It was, it is, an execration conducted
without one clear moment of seeing
What was to be sentenced to the pit, the leachfield, the pyre.
The garden from which we have
told ourselves we have been ejected,
Even as our kind has cast about looking for valuables to take
Remains for us an empty shell or vessel to fill up with ourselves,
with schemes of power,
Flickering drama and jingle about anything and everything
except what is there to be seen and heard.
Our surroundings have been made so much in our own image
there is no room for other.
Even our most vivid pictures or stories
of the animals and plants we admire
Become exercises in technical mastery
There for adulation and little more
---or are moments of fleeting diversion.
Not one in a thousand of us,
seeing the leaping sealion trying to shake off the pursing orca
Cry out "brother! sister!" silently or LOUD.
===
Off: Amiri Baraka
"we want poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons...
"We want a Black Poem. And a Black
World.
"Let the world be a Black Poem.
"And Let All Black People Speak This
Poem
"Silently
"Or LOUD."
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