poems about shared humanity

Poem of the Week, by Gwendolyn Brooks

Friends, I’m leading a FREE workshop, Mapping the Unmapped, next Saturday, January 24, from 12-3 pm Central time. This workshop has been updated for anyone living in the midst of tremendous upheaval, e.g., the ICE invasion in the Twin Cities. No writing experience necessary; while we’re welcome to share reflections, we won’t be sharing or critiquing our writing. My hope is we’ll all leave with some useful techniques to help keep ourselves steady and grounded in the midst of upheaval of any kind. Email me to sign up.

Three friends and I stood for hours behind a table in 11 degree weather at a massive protest last Saturday, dishing up brownies and cake and water and hand warmers and gloves from a local food justice nonprofit to shivering, energized protesters of all ages and races and backgrounds. “I love you!” one young woman shouted at me. “I love you right back!” I said, and we hugged each other.

In the past week: Two of my neighbors were tear gassed as they yelled at ICE agents who had just crashed a car driven by a brown man. My nephew walked through an ICE raid at the high school adjoining his middle school. Workers remodeling a friend’s house and housecleaners for other friends are too afraid to leave their apartments. I turned the corner onto my own block and had to pull over to avoid three ICE vehicles zipping the wrong way up our one-way street. Whistles, car horns, and observers filming with their cell phones as multiple armed men haul brown people out of their cars or apartments or places of work and throw them to the ground are now commonplace.

What is happening here, with these nonstop raids, is not about returning people who came to this country hoping for a better life, nearly all of whom work nonstop to support their families and do not rely on any kind of public assistance, back to their countries of origin because they lack documentation. It is about racism. It is about terror. It is about cowing all of us into submission.

Paul Robeson, by Gwendolyn Brooks

That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

Please click here for more information about Gwendolyn Brooks. Today’s poem appears in The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, published in 2005 by the Library of America.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by William Stafford

Posted on January 11, 2020 by alisonmcghee

60004839212__30E2EEDE-424A-48BE-B9AD-706C3B31C6F8 Last fall I began getting letters like this from the president, the vice-president, the NRA, anti-abortion organizations. Not my typical mail. Why me? Then it came to me: in August a friend died, a Marine combat veteran, and in his honor I made a donation to the Wounded Warrior project, which must have triggered a hundred conservative mailing lists.

Given my political leanings, it would be easy to post those letters on Twitter with a snarky comment and watch the equally snarky responses roll in, but that would only make things worse. Here’s the thing: most people are not zealots. You can be a pacifist and still support veterans. You can be an atheist and still respect your neighbor’s need to pray to a God you don’t believe in. You can have deep qualms about abortion and still support the right to have one.

You can despise your uncle’s racist comments and cut off contact with him, or you can remember how he taught you to ride a bike and showed up at all your basketball games. You can remember how it felt when you woke up to your own internalized racism. You can choose to open a conversation with him, one that might open a mental window, one that will take a lot of patience that you might assume neither of you have.

But you do have that patience. We all do, once we recognize how deep the darkness is, and how easy it is to get lost.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other, by William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

For more information about William Stafford, please click here.

My website. My blog. My Facebook page.

Twitter and Instagram: @alisonmcgheewriter