Amused many)
Films
Us all
Sitting
Talking
Eating
Laughing
Being with
You,
As you
Play dead.
Later in
The van
Leaving
Your place
Of enchanted
Rest
We marvel
At who
Life
Has put into
Our vehicle.
Old friends
By now
Really
Because
Of you.
There is
No other
Explanation
Though
You
May
Continue
Your little
Afterlife game
Of
Playing dead.
***
Democratic Womanism
For Wongari Maathai
Traditionally capable, as in: “Mama, I’m
walking to Canada, and I’m taking you
and a bunch of other slaves with me.”
Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
—from the definition of “Womanist” in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens:
Womanist Prose, 1983, by the author
You ask me why I smile
when you tell me you intend
in the coming national elections
to hold your nose
and vote for the lesser of two evils.
There are more than two evils out there,
is one reason I smile.
Another is that our old buddy Nostradamus
comes to mind, with his dreadful
400-year-old prophecy: that our world
and theirs too
(our “enemies”— lots of kids included here)
will end (by nuclear nakba or holocaust)
in our lifetime. Which makes the idea of elections
and the billions of dollars wasted on them
somewhat fatuous.
A Southerner of Color,
my people held the vote
very dear
while others, for centuries,
merely appeared to play
with it.
One thing I can assure
you of is this:
I will never betray such pure hearts
by voting for evil
even if it were microscopic
which, as you can see in any newscast
no matter the slant,
it is not.
I want something else;
a different system
entirely.
One not seen
on this earth
for thousands of years. If ever.
Democratic Womanism.
Notice how this word has “man” right in the middle of it?
That’s one reason I like it. He is there, front and center. But he is surrounded.
I want to vote and work for a way of life
that honors the feminine;
a way that acknowledges
the theft of the wisdom
female and dark Mother leadership
might have provided our spaceship
all along.
I am not thinking
of a talking head
kind of gal:
happy to be mixing
it up
with the baddest
bad boys
on the planet
her eyes a slit
her mouth a zipper.
No, I am speaking of true
regime change.
Where women rise
to take their place
en masse
at the helm
of earth’s frail and failing ship;
where each thousand years
of our silence
is examined
with regret,
and the cruel manner in which our values
of compassion and kindness
have been ridiculed
and suppressed
brought to bear on the disaster
of the present time.
The past must be examined closely, I believe, before we can leave
it there.
I am thinking of Democratic, and, perhaps
Socialist, Womanism.
For who else knows so deeply
how to share but Mothers
and Grandmothers? Big sisters
and Aunts?
To love
and adore
both female and male?
Not to mention those in between.
To work at keeping
the entire community
fed, educated
and safe?
Democratic womanism,
Democratic Socialist
Womanism,
would have as its icons
such fierce warriors
for good as
Vandana Shiva
Aung San Suu Kyi,
Wangari Maathai
Harriet Tubman
Yoko Ono
Frida Kahlo
Angela Davis
Celia Sanchez
& Barbara Lee:
With new ones always rising, wherever you
look. Recent writers for instance:
Michelle Alexander, Isabel Wilkerson, and
Nancy Turner Banks, MD. Whose
books, read together, go a long way toward
bringing us up to speed on how our
declining country got this way.
You are also on this list, but it is so long (Isis
would appear midway) that I must stop or
be unable to finish the poem). So just know I’ve
stood you in a circle that includes
Marian Wright Edelman, Amy Goodman,
Sojourner Truth, Gloria Steinem and Mary
McLeod Bethune. John Brown, Frederick
Douglass, John Lennon and Howard Zinn
are there too. Happy to be surrounded!
There is no system
now in place
that can change
the disastrous course
Earth is on.
Who can doubt this?
The male leaders
of Earth
appear to have abandoned
their very senses
though most appear
to live now
entirely
in their heads.
They murder humans and other
animals
forests and rivers and mountains
every day
they are in office
and never seem
to notice it.
They eat and drink devastation.
Women of the world,
Is this devastation Us?
Would we kill whole continents for oil
(or anything else)
rather than limit
the number of consumer offspring we produce
and learn how to make our own fire?
Democratic Womanism.
Democratic Socialist Womanism.
A system of governance
we can dream and imagine and build together. One that recognizes
at least six thousand years
of brutally enforced complicity
in the assassination
of Mother Earth, but foresees six thousand years
ahead of us when we will not submit.
What will we need? A hundred years
at least to plan: (five hundred will be handed us
gladly
when the planet is scared enough)
in which circles of women meet,
organize ourselves, and,
allied with men
brave enough to stand with women,
nurture our planet to a degree of health.
And without ap
ology—
(impossible to make
a bigger mess than has been made)—
to tirelessly serving and resuscitating Our Mother ship
and with gratitude
for Her care of us
worshipfully commit to
rehabilitating
it.
***
Democratic Motherism
My partner, a musician and Vietnam veteran
(virtually kidnapped and forced to serve in
that disastrous and genocidal war without his
consent), is someone brave enough to stand
with women, unafraid of being surrounded
by or led by them. In conversing about what
it will take to reclaim our planet we agreed
that what Earth needs more than anything
is mothering. Earth, Mother Earth, needs
mothers, regardless of gender—though we all
recognize who most mothers have been, and
are. Mothering is an instinct, yes, but it is also
a practice. It can be learned. For women it
has been an eons-long experience: the art and
necessity of taking care of all, of everything,
of mothering. So perhaps the new “ism” we
are talking about is not classic Womanism,
but Motherism. Democratic Motherism.
In any case, we will continue to endure,
and detest, the systems currently in
place, in which the condition of countless starving,
tortured, enslaved and murdered children
is seen as acceptable, unless we forthrightly
begin to envision, and work for, something
better: some way for humans to exist and
thrive, without suffering the despair of every
second of every day knowing our present
predicament’s greatest cause is humanity’s
fear of sharing equally with others, and its
rapidly growing, partly because of this fear,
self-hatred.
On a recent visit to a still and quiet sacred
site in Hawaii that is now surrounded by the
pollution of unimaginable overcrowdedness
and lack of peace, I recently experienced
an insight that seemed at the time to be a
direct message from ancestors who had used
that site for thousands of years: it came to
me in the form of the name for a new world
political party (no kidding!). The Mother
Defend Yourself Party. “Mother” referring to
Earth. A poem (of course) accompanied it.
Mother defend
Yourself:
We who love you
Stand witness
To
Your innocence.
One of this party’s first responsibilities would
be to unite all segments of the globe in
making offerings at the scene of every place
the earth fights back in the effort to reclaim
her freedom and integrity from the tyranny
imposed on her by humanity. Where dams
have burst, where forest fires have raged,
where hillsides have crumbled. Where rivers
have run wild. I am saying, as I believe, that
we must begin again to have conversation
with our planet.
It was in Hawaii on an earlier visit, again
to a sacred site (although of course all of
Hawaii is sacred), that this became even
clearer to me.
A friend and I had gone on a “tour” of
sorts that brought us to this place. We got out
of the van and stood with our group at the
designated “lookout” point. We were looking
into a landscape that, though “beautiful”
in the Kodak-moment sense, was lifeless
and uninspiring. I commented on this to my
Hawaiian friend, an artist, who shrugged and
said: Of course. That is because what you’re
looking at, this whole area, was traditionally
sung to. What? I said. Yes, she said. Where
we’re standing used to be almost like a stage.
Folks who knew what they were doing,
praising the aina (the land), would come here
and sing their gratitude.
Well, I said. You are a singer. Sing!
Grabbing her tiny ukulele, which
accompanied her everywhere, she did just that.
As she sang in Hawaiian (a language
outlawed by U.S. colonial rule for decades; her
aunt had created a Hawaiian dictionary in an
effort to preserve the language) it seemed to
me the trees and other vegetation responded
by standing taller, fluffing themselves up. The
flowers among them appeared to fling their
scent. I became vividly aware of everything’s
aliveness.
This token of gratitude, awareness, affection,
might be our party’s first step.6
***
After Many Years and Much Silliness
After many years
and much silliness on both our parts
I invite you back to this sacred place
we used to come
to rest, to sleep, to dream;
to heal
I know you’ve missed it.
The rosa morada trees
whose blossoms consoled us
and the moonlit maguey
that made us wonder
were taken out by last month’s hurricane.
I witness the bare spaces with your eyes. And wait,
humbled, for your murmurs of acceptance
and letting go.
We are adrift now. Every boat has left the shore.
Everything in Nature is warning us
to hurry up
and share.
***
When I Join You
When I join you
in the effort for peace
I give myself over.
There
and not there.
Marching
with you
alongside
the many who have died
it is as if we are marching
across the Universe
and just ahead of us
if only in another galaxy
there is a door.
***
Going Out to the Garden
Going out to the garden
this morning
to plant seeds
for my winter greens
—the strong, fiery mustard
& the milder
broadleaf turnip—
I saw a gecko
who
like the rest of us
has been reeling from the heat.
Geckos like heat
I know this
but the heat
these last few days
has been excessive
for us
& for them.
A spray of water
from the hose
touched its skin:
I thought it would
run away.
There are crevices
aplenty
to hide in:
the garden wall
is made of stones.
But no
not only
did the gecko
not run away
it appeared
to raise
its eyes
& head
looking for more.
I gave it.
Squirt after
squirt
of cooling
spray
from the gr
een
garden hose.
Is it the end
of the world?
It seemed to ask.
This bliss,
is it Paradise?
I bathed it
until we were both
washed clean
of the troubles
of this world
at least for this moment:
this moment of pleasure
of gecko
joy
as I with so much happiness
played Goddess
to Gecko.
***
Notes
1. The poems of The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers were written between October 2009 and August 2011.
2. Three deep bows to Noelle Hanrahan, Angela Davis and Gloria LaRiva. Champions of liberty; long distance, unwavering.
For a fuller comprehension of this poem please view these films: Incident at Oglala, In Prison My Whole Life, Trudell, and Why We Fight.
3. B. B. King and Lucille, his guitar.
4. April 20, 1997, New York City, the 92nd St. Y. Italicized portion of the poem written in September, 2009.
5. Happy Birthday, beloveds! Gloria, Quincy, Mel, Tracy, Flannery. And especially the March-born hero who started it all: my brother Bill. William Henry Walker. Born March 23, a smiling, generous, well-balanced baby and child who was the same as a man.
6. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson; AIDS, Opium, Diamonds and Empire: The Deadly Virus of International Greed, by Nancy Turner Banks, MD; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander—these three books, read in this order, are a university course in history and present-day reality hard to obtain otherwise. Enjoy! Not because they’re easy to read. They’re not. They are deeply painful. The joy comes from their existence, since our only hope is knowing what is (and has been) going on.
Someone has said,”We don’t need another ‘ism’.” And I agree that the “isms” of the past have been tiresome; but this is partly because woman, and especially dark woman, had no real place in them. In any event, this offering, like all those made now, is comparable to a simple discarded stone brought with humility to the collective pile of our understanding as we look the future in the face and resolve, whatever our fears, to move forward.
Photo Credits
Page 44: (top) New dormitory for the girls of Margaret Okari Primary School © Kwamboka K. Okari; (middle) Yvonne and Brenda © Kwamboka K. Okari; (bottom) Flower image courtesy of the Dale M. Mcdonald Collection, State Library and Archives of Florida.
Page 52: Alice Walker and Sean Lennon © Pratibha Parmar/Kali Films.