There are no words, really, to describe the degree of mixed emotions I feel at this moment knowing I that a great blogging friend might quit because of the lunacy that has taken over this country. I think this paragraph she wrote on a May 10 post says it all (from a Google cache):

And goddamn it, yes it bothers the shit out of me that when black or white women are shit on by sexism, men of color have something to say about it, but when latin@ mothers are fucking ripped from their children, imprisoned, deported–there’s silence–silence that is interrupted by nationalistic fuckheads that call me traitor and vendida. Is it being a traitor to remember your own? It’s being a traitor to love the your sisters and mothers and aunts and grandmothers?

When is this shit going to stop people? I will never know what it is like being a Latina living in this world, nor will I attempt to explain it. But, that does not mean I will not listen with an open mind and heart to their own struggles and their own experiences. For those who would like to honor her, please consider participating on The Carnival of Radical Action that is being hosted by Sylvia.

Here are two poems I found that I think really express what BfP is feeling. One is Lorna Dee Cervantes’ Poem For The Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, An Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe In The War Between Races that was written in 1981 and the other is by Donna Kate Rushin’s The Bridge Poem written in 1983. Funny how things have never change.

Poem For The Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, An Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe In The War Between Races
In my land there are no distinctions.
The barbed wire politics of oppression
have been torn down long ago. The only reminder
of past battles, lost or won, is a slight
rutting in the fertile fields.

In my land
people write poems about love,
full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.
Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps.
There are no boundaries.
There is no hunger, no
complicated famine or greed.

I am not a revolutionary.
I don’t even like political poems.
Do you think I can believe in a war between races?
I can deny it. I can forget about it
when I’m safe,
living on my own continent of harmony
and home, but I am not
there.

I believe in revolution
because everywhere the crosses are burning,
sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,
there are snipers in the schools…
(I know you don’t believe this.
You think this is nothing
but faddish exaggeration. But they
are not shooting at you.)

I’m marked by the color of my skin.
The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly.
They are aiming at my children.
These are facts.
Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my
“excuse me” tongue, and this
nagging preoccupation
with the feeling of not being good enough.

These bullets bury deeper than logic.
Racism is not intellectual.
I can not reason these scars away.

Outside my door
there is a real enemy
who hates me.

I am a poet
who yearns to dance on rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn’t fade out
the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage.
My own days bring me slaps on the face.
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land

and this is my land.

I do not believe in the war between races

but in this country
there is war.

The Bridge Poem
I’ve had enough
I’m sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me
Right?

I explain my mother to my father
my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother
my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks
the Black church folks to the ex-hippies
the ex-hippies to the Black separatists
the Black separatists to the artists
the artists to my friends’ parents…

Then
I’ve got to explain myself
To everybody

I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.

Forget it
I’m sick of it.

I’m sick of filling in your gaps

Sick of being your insurance against
the isolation of your self-imposed limitations

Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners

Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches

Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people

Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip

I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your humanness

I’m sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long

I’m sick of mediating with your worst self
On behalf of your better selves

I am sick
Of having to remind you
To breathe
Before you suffocate
Your own fool self

Forget it
Stretch or drown
Evolve or die

The bridge I must be
Is the bridge to my own power
I must translate
My own fears
Mediate
My own weaknesses

I must be the bridge to nowhere
But my true self
And then
I will be useful

Related posts

• US Court Overturns Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Death Sentence (5)
• Unemployment and a Web 2.0 Challenge (13)
• To A Dear Friend of Mine (5)
• The Words We Use: The Rhetoric of Race (13)
• The Word According to Kos (23)

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