still denying its people honest information.
But we who walk among the land of the relatively free
have an obligation to hunt down the truth,
have an obligation to lift our voices against any more pain
inflicted on anyone in our names.
Our resistance is the key.
The caged bird sings.
The caged bird would rather be free.
Stick
She’s a metal pole
in zero degree weather.
I’m afraid if I put my tongue on her
it will stick forever.
When the Bough Breaks
It’s two a.m.
The emergency room psychiatrist looks up from his clipboard
with eyes paid to care
and asks me if I see people who “aren’t really there.”
I say, “I see people…
how the hell am I supposed to know
if they’re really there or not?”
He doesn’t laugh.
Neither do I.
The math’s not on my side,
ten stitches and one lie, “I swear I wasn’t trying to die,
I just wanted to see what my pulse looked like from the inside.”
Fast forward one year.
I’m standing in an auditorium behind a microphone
reading a poem to four hundred Latino high school kids
who live with the breath of the INS
crawling up their mothers’ backbones
and I am frantically hiding my scars,
‘cause the last thing I want these kids to know
is that I ever thought my life was too hard.
I’ve never seen a bomb drop.
I’ve never felt hunger.
I’ve also never seen lightning strike
but I know we’ve all heard the thunder
and it doesn’t take a genius to tell something’s burning.
“Please call me by my true name,
I am the child in Uganda all skin and bone.”
Do we remember the rest?
And, “Jesus Wept.”
Jesus wept, but look at our eyes,
dry as the desert sand
dusting the edges of our soldiers’ wedding bands.
Do you know children in Palestine fly kites
to prove they’re still free?
Can you imagine how that string
must feel between their fingers
as they kneel in the cinders of US-made missile heads?
You can count the dead by the colors in the sky.
The bough is breaking.
The cradle is falling.
Right now a six-year-old girl is crouched in a ditch in Lebanon
wishing on falling bombs.
Right now our government is recording the test scores
of Black and Latino 4th graders
to see how many prison beds will be needed in the year 2015.
Right now there’s a man on the street outside my door
with outstretched hands full of heartbeats no one can hear.
He has cheeks like torn sheet music
every tear-broken crescendo falling on deaf ears.
At his side there’s a boy with eyes like an anthem
no one stands up for.
Doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there.
It’s that we ignore the ones who are.
‘Til we find ourselves scarred and ashamed
walking into emergency rooms at two am
flooded with a pain we cannot name or explain,
bleeding from the outside in.
Our skin is not impervious.
Cultures built on greed and destruction
do not pick and choose who they kill.
Do we really believe our need for Prozac
has nothing to do with Fallujah,
with Kabul, with the Mexican border,
with the thousands of US school kids
bleeding budget cuts that will never heal
to fuel war tanks?
Thank god for denial.
Thank god we can afford the makeup
to pile upon the face of it all.
Look at the pretty world.
Look at all the smiling people,
and the sky with a missile between her teeth
and a steeple through her heart
and not a single star left to hold her
and the voices of a thousand broken nations
saying, “Wake me, wake me
Ear Muffs
My favorite teacher once told me
she wears three hats at the same time
while walking through her neighborhood
in the backwoods of Maine;
one to keep her head warm,
one to block the sun from her face,
and one bright orange hat
to keep the hunters from shooting her in the brain.
She looked at me seriously and said,
“I suppose I could get a hat that does all three
but that would be an awfully funny looking hat.”
You, my love
are a funny looking hat.
That is to say,
you are everything I need.
Forgive me for the days
I am ear muffs
in Florida
on a sandy beach
during a heat wave.
Say Yes
When two violins are placed in a room
if a chord on one violin is struck
the other violin will sound the note.
If this is your definition of hope,
this is for you.
For the ones who know how powerful we are,
who know we can sound the music in the people around us
simply by playing our own strings.
For the ones who sing life into broken wings,
open their chests and offer their breath
as wind on a still day when nothing seems to be moving
spare those intent on proving god is dead.
For you when your fingers are red
from clutching your heart so it will beat faster.
For the time you mastered the art
of giving yourself for the sake of someone else.
For the ones who have felt what it is to crush the lies
and lift truth so high the steeples bow to the sky.
This is for you.
This is also for the people who wake early
to watch flowers bloom.
Who notice the moon at noon on a day when the world
has slapped them in the face with its lack of light.
For the mothers who feed their children first
and thirst for nothing when they’re full.
This is for women.
And for the men who taught me
only women bleed with the moon,
but there are men who cry when women bleed
men who bleed from women’s wounds.
And this is for that moon
on the nights she seems hung by a noose,
for the people who cut her loose
and for the people still waiting for the rope to burn
about to learn they have scissors in their hands.
This is for the man who showed me
the hardest thing about having nothing
is having nothing to give,
who said the only reason to live is to give ourselves away.
So this is for the day we’ll quit or jobs
and work for something real.
We’ll feel for sunshine in the shadows,
look for sunrays in the shade.
This is for the people who rattle the cage that slave wage built,
and for the ones who didn’t know the filth until tonight
but right now are beginning songs that sound something like
people turning their porch lights on
and calling the homeless back home.
This is for all the shit we own,
and for the day we’ll learn how much we have
when we learn to give that shit away.
This is for doubt becoming faith,
for falling from grace and climbing back up.
For trading our silver platters for something that matters,
like the gold that shines from our hands
when we hold each other.
This is for your grandmother,
who walked a thousand miles on broken glass
to find that single patch of grass to plant a family tree
where the fruit would grow to laugh.
For the ones who know the math of war
has always been subtraction
so they live like an action of addition.
For you when you give like every star is wishing on you,
and for the people still wishing on stars
this is for you too.
This is for the times you went through hell
so someone else wouldn’t have to.
For the time you taught a 14-year-old girl
she was powerful.
For the time you taught a 14-year-old boy
he was beautiful.
For the radical anarchist asking a republican to dance,
‘cause what’s the chance of anyone moving from right to left
if the only moves they see are NBC and CBS.
This is for the no becoming yes,
for fear becoming trust,
for saying I love you to people who will never say it to us.
For scraping away the rust and remembering how to shine.
For the dime you gave away when you didn’t have a penny,
For the many beautiful things we do,
for every song we’ve ever sung,
for refusing to believe in miracles
because miracles are the impossible coming true
and everything is possible.
This is for the possibility that guides us
and for the possibilities still waiting to sing
and spread their wings inside us,
‘cause tonight Saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that whatever song we’ve been singing we sing even more.
The world needs us right now more than it ever has before.
Pull all your strings.
Play every chord.
If you’re writing letters to the prisoners
start tearing down the bars.
If you’re handing out flashlights in the dark
start handing out stars.
Never go a second hushing the percussion of your heart.
Play loud.
Play like you know the clouds
have left too many people cold and broken
and you’re their last chance for sun.
Play like there’s no time for hoping brighter days will come.
Play like the apocalypse is only 4...3...2… but you
have a drum in your chest that could save us.
You have a song like a breath that could raise us
like the sunrise into a dark sky that cries to be blue.
Play like you know we won’t survive if you don’t
but we will if you do.
Play like Saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that we give every single breath.
This is for saying, YES.
This is for saying, YES.
I Do
(sung)
ba bi di ba ba bi di ba ba ba bi ba bi di ba
ba dang a dang dang a dingy dong ding
I do I do I do
dip da dip da dip
I do I do
dip da dip da dup
ba bi di ba ba bi di ba ba ba bi ba bi di b
ba dang a dang dang a dingy dong ding
I do………
But the fuckers say we can’t.
‘Cause you’re a girl
and I’m a girl… or at least something close
so the most we can hope for
is an uncivil union in Vermont
and I want church bells.
I want rosary beads.
I want Jesus on his knees.
I wanna walk down the aisle
feeling the patriarchy smile.
That’s not true.
But I do
wanna spend my life with you.
And I wanna know, fifty years from now,
when you’re in a hospital room getting ready to die,
when visiting hours are for family members only,
I wanna know they’ll let me in
to say goodbye.
‘Cause I’ve been fifty years
memorizing the way the lines beneath your eyes
form rivers when you cry,
and I’ve held my hand like an ocean at your cheek
saying, “Baby, flow to me…”
‘cause for fifty years I’ve watched you grow with me.
Fifty years of you never letting go of me
through nightmares and dreams
and everything in-between,
from the day I said, “Buy me a ring.
Buy me a ring that will turn my finger green
so I can imagine our love is a forest.
I wanna get lost in you.”
And I swear I grew like a wild flower
every hour of the fifty years I was with you.
And that’s not to say we didn’t have hard days.
Like the day you said, “That check-out clerk was so sweet.”
And I said, “I’d like to eat that check-out clerk.”
And you said, “Honey, that’s not funny.”
And I said, “Baby, maybe you could take a fucking joke
every now and then.”
So I slept on the couch that night.
But when morning came you were laughing.
Yeah, there were times we were both half-in
and half-out the door, but I never needed more
than the stars on your skin to lead me home.
For fifty years you were my favorite poem.
And I’d read you every night
knowing I might never understand every word
but that was ok ‘cause the lines of you
were the closest thing to holy I’d ever heard.
You’d say, “This kind of love has to be verb.
We are paint on a slick canvas.
It’s gonna take a whole lot to stick,
but if we do we’ll be a masterpiece.”
And we were.
From the beginning living in towns
that frowned at our hand-holding,
folding their stares like hate notes into our pockets
so we could pretend they weren’t there.
You said, “Fear is only a verb if you let it be.
Don’t you dare let go of my hand.”
That was my favorite line.
That and the time when we saw two boys
kissing on the street in Kansas,
and we bo
th broke down crying,
‘cause it was Kansas and you said,
“What are the chances of seeing
anything but corn in Kansas!?”
We were born again that day.
I cut your cord and you cut mine
and the chords of time
played like a concerto of faith ,
like we could feel the rope unwind,
the fraying red noose of hate loosening,
loosening from years of…
People like you aren’t welcome here.
People like you can’t work here.
People like you cannot adopt.
So we had lots of cats and dogs
and once even a couple of monkeys
you taught to sing,
hey, hey we’re the monkeys
You were crazy like that.
And I was so crazy about you
on nights you couldn’t sleep
I’d lay awake for hours counting sheep for you,
and you would rewrite the rhythm of my heartbeat
with the way you held me in the morning,
resting your head on my chest
I swear my breath turned silver the day your hair did.
Like I swore marigolds grew
in the folds of my eyelids the first time saw you,
and they bloomed the first time I watched you
dance to the tune of our kitchen kettle in our living room.
In a world that could have left us hard as metal
we were soft as nostalgia together.
For fifty years we feathered wings too wide to be prey
and we flew through days strong and days fragile.
You would fold your love into an origami firefly
and throw it through my passageways
‘til all my hidden chambers were lit with lanterns.
Now every trap door
of every pore of my body is open
because of you, because of us
so I do, I do, I do
wanna be in that room with you.
When visiting hours are for family members only
I wanna know they’ll let me in.
I wanna know they’ll let me hold you
while I sing…
ba bi di ba ba bidiba babi di ba bi di ba ba
dang a dang dang a dingy dong ding
I’m so in love with you
baby, I’m so in love with you
dip a dip a dip ba bi di ba a dang a dang dang
a dingy dong ding
good bye.
Notes and Credits
For Eli
Inspired by the shared letters of Eli Wright and his mother Vrnda dasi. I am forever grateful to both of them for their time and heart. For more info go to: www.LiberateThis.com and www.MFSO.org.