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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2021 by Martina Green McGowan, MD
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Cover and internal art by Diana Ejaita
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
Published by Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
I Am the Rage
Forever Lost between Sunlight and Shadow
Motivated Forgetting
Human Enough
Navigating This Hazardous Terrain
Benediction Number 9
There Is Too Little Time
America’s Postpartum Depression
In My Rearview Mirror
America’s Music
Numb to the News
Rhetoric
We Still Stand (Noble and Proud)
A Shocking New Race War
How Could We Not Have Appreciated That
Why We Beat Our Children
A New Song
Not Again
Be Careful What You Ask of Me
Traffic Stop
How You Hate to Rape Me
Tale of Two Georges
America, Something Is Wrong
Juneteenth
We Are Alike, You and I
BIPOC
Spoken Words Fail Me But…
Cultural Upheaval
Today, I Cannot…
What Sadness We Carry in Ordinary Times
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
To my daughter and my best friend, Amanda, who listens to my stories and poems with great patience, gives honest critique, but more importantly, lends unwavering support to my projects.
To all the Mothers and Fathers of Children of Color.
To my father.
America, once again, has civil and racial unrest with protesters flooding our cities, calling for justice for all, with people being detained, brutalized, and murdered on the streets, as well as in their homes, without the benefit of due process. These and other heinous crimes are sadly not new to our nation, nor do they show any signs of ending.
I am the American Heartbreak –
The rock on which Freedom
Stumped its toe –
The great mistake
That Jamestown made
Long ago.
—Langston Hughes, 1951
I Am the Rage
I Am the Rage
I am the rage, roiling just beneath the surface
I am the dream deferred
Again
I am the promises kneaded and repeated
But never kept
I am the air between light and dark
Fueling flames that burn,
but can neither be consumed
nor satisfy its own abiding hunger
I am the glowing embers you continue to poke and prod
with meanness
That bubbles over onto the streets
I am the ravenous appetite to destroy
Something
Anything
I am the ever-present clanking chains
In the belly of the cargo hold
Struggling to love myself
A thing You have taught me to loathe
I am the dismal days and inky skies
I am the niggardly feeling that there is not enough
Will never be enough
Land
Freedom
Education
Life
To satisfy us all
I am the outrage that flares every time you say something foolish like
“I thought you were already free.”
I am the disappointment that breathes hot and silent
Every time I am dismissed
Discharged
Dishonored
Cast aside
Counted as worthless or meaningless
I am the melody that lies inside every Negro spiritual
That sings praises of diminishing hopes in this life
And a brighter, fairer world in the next
I am the mother who wields the belt that cuts both ways
that beats my children
in hopes that You will spare their lives
I am the salty tears of anxious mothers
Frightened each time her child crosses the threshold
Praying for a return that is not guaranteed
Like payment of some impossible garnishee on the lives we want for them
I am the furthest point from You
Thrashing about in the sea of doom
Gasping for air
I am the dark fiber that runs through our shared history
that will not allow You to forget
A constant reminder to us both
that I can never go home
Can never find home
I am the rage, running unbridled through the streets
I am the fire this time
I am the rapacious thirst seeking justice for all
On these dusky days and obsidian nights
I am the rage that lives within the powder keg
of unfulfilled lives
Awaiting the spark
I am the rage
I am the lost sheep
I am the muted prayer that we will
see each other clearly one day
Forever Lost between Sunlight and Shadow
For Breonna
Caught between sunlight and shadow
Yesterday she lived carefree
Perhaps again tomorrow, she thought
Except that
This day she was murdered
In her home
Asleep
Defending her love
Defending her peace
Thinking she was free from the shackles and the shadows of history and hate
But we are never free
Yesterday she went to work
And helped people
And laughed
Remembered bright days
And smiled her beautiful, luminous smile
Yesterday the shadow had not yet issued the “no knock” warrant
Yesterday the shadow that haunts us all had not yet battered down her door
In the middle of the night
Whe
re she slept
Thinking she still belonged to the sunlight
Yesterday she spoke with her mother
Transported people to the hospital
Held their hands and shared in their moments of pain and darkness
Yesterday she ordered lunch with her friends
Yesterday she planned on going out Friday night
And maybe Saturday night too
Stop downtown to pick up some barbecue
Thought about what she could learn at work
To improve herself
To earn more pay
To rise through the ranks
Yesterday she did not know that the shadow was so very, very close
In fact
Only a few hours and eight bullets away
Yesterday she thought she still had time to bask in the glow of a thousand tomorrows
Yesterday she lived at the right address
Not a great address
But her address nonetheless
Where she could walk outside
And laugh with friends
And hang on to the bright promise of hope
Yesterday she did not know that
The wrong address would become her address
That the person she would be mistaken for would already be in jail
That there would never, ever be another tomorrow
Yesterday she did not know
That her light would be erased
Yesterday her calendar was full of hope
Promise packed to the margins
But no more
Never again to think of tomorrow
Her light, brutally extinguished by the shadow
Bent on destroying us all
Motivated Forgetting
Whips, chains, and shackles
Mark the apocalyptic turn of all darker peoples
Whips we continue to use on ourselves in corralling
Our unnatural naturally violent nature
Or so You tell us
The intensity of life has not changed in these 400 years
200 years as freed-men and freed-women
Or, only free-ish
Our lives only remaining physically intact if we can continue to outrun
The slave patrollers and the police
There is no afterward for such brutal and bestial treatment
Unless you consider heaven
Maybe
There is only motivated forgetting of the cruelty endured all these centuries
There are fragile hopes that die
On the fluttering wings of butterflies
But there is no life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness
Here
Human Enough
With diminishing confidence
We send out our heart-sensors
To try to remember where our children are supposed to be
And at the same time
To touch the God that binds us
To each other
The God that binds us to each other
Tries to break that awkward silence now filling our homes
As we review our day’s journey
And begin to wonder where our children truly are
And if they will return
If they will return unharmed
Once again on this freedom’s eve
In a world that denies the proclamation of their
emancipation
Reminding them daily that they are not free
To be
To love
To breathe
To live in peace
To have the time to reflect and contemplate
To reflect on the days that we have lived
And contemplate what the tomorrows may bring
But we already know
Tomorrow will bring the same fear
The same fear that we are unequal
That we are still three-fifths human
On a good day
And on a bad day
We are not human at all
Never completely whole people
Never entirely free from bondage
Never free from violent assaults on the body and the mind
The violent assaults of the mind and the streets
Force mothers and fathers
To our knees
To hold watchnight service within our hearts daily
To daily hold watchnight service in our hearts
To bring our beautiful three-fifths human children home again
Singing songs of sorrow
Songs of oppression
Slave songs
Sometimes we simply rock and moan
We stand, we kneel, we pray
Sometimes in our private prayer closets
But always in our hearts
Always from our hearts
We reach out to the God that keeps us
And binds to each other
Bent low before the One Source
Backs broken in prayer and supplication.
Backs broken in prayer and supplication
Tonight and every night is watch night vigil for my child
Prayerfully asking
On this night
Will my child be human enough
To return to me unharmed
Navigating This Hazardous Terrain
We navigate this hazardous terrain
Trying to advise You that there is indeed a struggle
There is a gap
Seeking a seat at the table
To plead our cause
When You claim there is no cause for alarm
No brutality
No violence
No otherness
To seek restitution for our lives distorted by
A people who would douse our incandescent spirits
Take away our languages
And rename our tribes
A delicate and deliberate climb
Out of the slimy pit
Continually living on the edge of change and promise
Never fulfilled
Surviving a waking nightmare
Beseeching You to break the shackles
You refuse to acknowledge even exist
Holding back the violence inherent in unrecognized anger
Which will rise to bloodshed again and again
Because the struggle to bridge the gap
is way too real
And far too much to contain in this puny vessel
This mortal flesh
Always just a hairsbreadth away from death
As we continue to navigate this hazardous terrain
Benediction Number 9
I must to let you go, my friend
Although friend is not the right term
My acquaintance is perhaps closer than mark
Floating in the outer rim of your influence and sight line
The smallest speck of consideration in how you think and see
Letting go of the noose that binds us
to what we could have been to each other
Teacher
Mentor
The peace we could have brokered
The good we could have done
Together
For months, or is it years, I have tried to whitewash
the frayed baggage of the beliefs
you carry
And cherish
And cling to
Beliefs I thought we could investigate together
And learn from each other
But
your vile language
And contemptible moral superiority
Can no longer be tolerated
And, in case you did not know,
Tolerate is not a word of friendship
In this moment of crisis
Which should mark a time of change
You go back to your safe space
And you announce that you are done with trying
Done with conversation
You would have joined us in the struggle but…
But the protest did not go the way you wanted
The rage spilled over from cracked cups of peace to looting and burning
As it always does
Your insolence and blindness
Can no longer be sanctioned by my heart
The underlying, all-too-familiar cadence of this equality dance
has grown laboriously burdensome to my spirit
I wish you well in protecting your moral high ground
But I now know
I can no longer call you friend
If I ever could
There Is Too Little Time
There is too little time to teach our children
That there is no after
To this ubiquitous feeling that
Life is but a stream
Trailing from our bodies
Almost unseen
There is too little time to spoon-feed our children
Giving them false hope and false hype while
Trying to convince ourselves that
The world can be full of wonder and fair
But they are not free to hold it
There is too little time to teach our children
That the fairy-light touch
Can quickly turn into a bite from a policeman’s club
There is too little time to teach our children
To say “Aye” to all that life has to offer
And to every passing whim
Knowing it will not be offered to them
There is too little time to teach our children
To fight to keep their spirits free
The insignificance of a hope for tomorrow
Managing the lies of the apostles and apostates alike
The sweetness of oranges
The tiny moments that make life sweet
The defiance built into their very DNA
There is too little time to allow our children
to be children
America’s Postpartum Depression
We can hear it in the streets