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.
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Once, at a Twins play-off game, I sat next to an older couple. They opened a tote and pulled out sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, peeled carrots, small bags of grapes, and cookies. Dinner, packed at home and brought to the game. There was something about this couple I loved.
Alison McGhee 