Poetic Insubordination

Sometimes, when time, reason or sanity escapes us, when heartbreak is too heavy to bear, we turn to the poets, those who clarify and illuminate our world, those whose insubordination to power, to authority, to conformity, not only elevates our collective human soul, but reminds us, over and over, that no, things do not have to be this way.
‍

Identity Card
Mahmoud Darwish

Write down!
I am an Arab
And my identity card number is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth will come after a summer
Will you be angry?

[...]

Write down!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks ...
So will the State take them
As it has been said?!

Therefore!
Write down on the top of the first page:
I do not hate people
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food
Beware ...
Beware ...
Of my hunger
And my anger!

Read the full poem here.

***

BERLIN 1884/5
“Come buy History! Come buy History
Niyi Osundare

I looked round for vendors of my own past,
For that Hall where, many seasons ago,
My Continent was sliced up like a juicy mango

To quell the quarrel of alien siblings
I looked for the knife which exacted the rift
How many kingdoms held its handle

The bravado of its blade
The wisdom of potentates who put
The map before the man

The cruel arrogance of empire,
Of kings/queens who laid claim to rivers, to mountains,
To other peoples and other gods and other histories

And they who went to bed under one conqueror’s flag,
Waking up the next beneath the shadows of another
Their ears twisted to the syllable of alien tongues

Gunboats
Territories of terror...

Oh that map, that knife, those contending emperors
These bleeding scars in a Continent’s soul,
Insisting on a millennium of healing.

More of his poems here.

***

A Litany for Survival
Audre Lorde

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

Read the full poem here.

***

Fifteen Years of Darkness
Liu Xiaobo

Before dawn at home in Beijing, 6/4/2004
Fifteenth anniversary offering for 6/4

15 years ago
a massacre took place at daybreak
I died then was reborn

15 years have passed
daybreak bayonets dyed red
is still a blade fixed in the eyes

15 years have passed
I still have nightmares of those departed souls
I see them soaked with blood
I write each stroke each line
as an outpouring of the tomb

15 years have passed
within the darkness of vanished freedom
I wait for the hour-hand to point to pre-
dawn’s advent of the fifteenth anniversary offering

Read the full poem here.

***

Of The Empire
Mary Oliver

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

***