194 Racism and discrimination poems

I Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy: Sails flashing to the wind like weapons, sharks following the moans the fever and the dying; horror the corposant and compass rose. Middle Passage: voyage through death to life upon these shores. “10 April 1800— Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says their moaning is a prayer for death, ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves. Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.” Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann: Standing to America, bringing home black gold, black ivory, black seed. Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, of his bones New England pews are made, those are altar lights that were his eyes.

Peace is the active presence of Justice. The wrinkles on the brown face of the carrying case conform to the buttocks, on which the streaks of water from a five-gallon can dribble on the tailfront of the borrowed shirt he would wear if he could drain the pus from his swaddling bandages, striations of skin tunneling into the photograph. This is no simple mug shot of a runaway boy in a training film, Soweto's pummeled wire, though the turrets of light glisten in smoke, the soft coal hooding his platform entrance, dull and quiet. His father's miner's shoes stand in puddles of polish, the black soot baked into images of brittle torso, an inferno of bullets laid out in a letter bomb, the frontispiece of one sergeant- major blackening his mustache. On the drive to Evaton a blank pass away from Sharpeville where the freehold morgans were bought by a black bishop from Ontario, Canada, on a trek northward from the Cape in 1908, I speak to myself as the woman riding in the backseat talks of this day, her husband's death, twenty-three years ago, run over by an Afrikaner in the wrong passing lane; the passbook on the shoulder of the road leading to Evaton is not the one I have in my hand, and the photograph is not of my great- grandfather, who set sail for Philadelphia in the war year of 1916. He did not want a reception, his letters embarking on a platform at Queenstown where his eloquence struck two Zulu warriors pledged to die in the homelands because they could not spin their own gold. These threaded heads weigh down the ears in design of the warrior, Shaka, indifferent to the ruthless offerings over the dead bodies of his wives, childless in the campaigns with the British, who sit on the ships of the Indian Ocean each kraal shuddering near the borders; her lips turn in profile to the dust rising over a road where his house once stood; one could think of the women carrying firewood as an etching in remembrance to the silence, commencing at Sharpeville, but this is Evaton, where he would come from across the galleyship of spears turning in his robes to a bookmark; it is a good book, the picture of words in the gloss of a photograph, the burned image of the man who wears this image on the tongue of a child, who might hold my hand as we walk in late afternoon into the predestined sun. The press of wrinkles on the blanketed voice of the man who took the train from Johannesburg is flattened in Cape Town, and the history of this book is on a trestle where Gandhi worshipped in Natal, and the Zulu lullaby I cannot sing in Bantu is this song in the body of a passbook and the book passes into a shirt and the back that wears it.

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi; they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi. They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong—mis in Mississippi. A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi. Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi. My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name. I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi. When I turned 33 my father said,It’s your Jesus year—you’re the same age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi. I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name— though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

death surrounds itself with the living i watch them take the body from the house i’m a young kid maybe five years old the whole thing makes no sense to me i hear my father say lord jesus what she go and do this for i watch him walk out the backdoor of the house i watch him walk around the garden kick the dirt stare at the flowers & shake his head  shake his head he shakes his head all night long yazoo jackson vicksburg we must have family in almost every city i spent more time traveling than growing up guess that’s why i’m still shorter than my old man he don’t like to stay in one place much he tell me soon as people get to know your last name seem like they want to call you by your first boy    if someone ask you your name tell them to call you mississippi not sippi or sip but mississippi how many colored folks you know name mississippi none see now you can find a whole lot of folks whose name is canada just like you can find 53 people in any phone book whose name is booker t. washington your mother she was a smart woman gave you a good name not one of them abolitionist names what you look like with a name like john brown or william lloyd garrison that don’t have no class your mother she named you after the river cause of its beauty and mystery just like my mother named me nevada cause she didn’t know where it was

That day in December I sat down by Miss Muffet of Montgomery. I was myriad-weary. Feets swole from sewing seams on a filthy fabric; tired-sore a pedalin’ the rusty Singer; dingy cotton thread jammed in the eye. All lifelong I’d slide through century-reams loathsome with tears. Dreaming my own silk-self. It was not like they all say. Miss Liberty Muffet she didn’t jump at the sight of me. Not exactly. They hauled me away—a thousand kicking legs pinned down. The rest of me I tell you—a cloud. Beautiful trouble on the dead December horizon. Come to sit in judgment. How many miles as the Jim Crow flies? Over oceans and some. I rumbled. They couldn’t hold me down. Long. No. My feets were tired. My eyes were sore. My heart was raw from hemming dirty edges of Miss L. Muffet’s garment. I rode again. A thousand bloody miles after the Crow flies that day in December long remembered when I sat down beside Miss Muffet of Montgomery. I said—like the joke say—What’s in the bowl, Thief? I said—That’s your curse. I said—This my way. She slipped her frock, disembarked, settled in the suburbs, deaf, mute, lewd, and blind. The bowl she left behind. The empty bowl mine. The spoiled dress. Jim Crow dies and ravens come with crumbs. They say—Eat and be satisfied. I fast and pray and ride.

I am not murdered, and I am not missing, but parts of me have been disappeared. — Leanne Simpson They too know all too well that some cracks were built just for us to fall through.
 We live in a world that tries to steal spirits each day; they steal ours by taking us away. From Industrial Schools to forced assimilation, genocide means removal 
of those who birth nations — our living threatens. Colonization has been choking us for generations. I tell my girls they are vessels of spirit, air to lungs expanding; this world cannot breathe without us. There are days 
I wish I didn’t have to teach these lessons, but as an Indigenous womxn 
silence is deadening. There is danger in being seen, our bodies are targets marked for violence. We carry the Earth’s me too inside us, 
a howling wind, our mothers & their mothers swallowed these bullets long ago. The voices ricochet I wish I were invisible I wish I were invisible 
I wish echoes
 in my eardrums — we know what it’s like to live in fear. Colonialism’s bullet sits cocked, waiting behind a finger on trigger. We breathe and speak and sing
 for survival. We carve out in lines; we write —I know joy I know pain I know love I know love I know— lessons we’ve carried throughout time. Should I go missing: don’t stop searching; drag every river until it turns red and the waters of our names stretch a flood so wide it catches everything. And we find each other whole and sacred, alive and breathing and breathing and breathing.

His spirit is smoke ascended to high heaven. His father, by the cruelest way of pain,

One and one make two, the literalist said. So far they've made five billion, said the lateralist, or ten times that, if you count the dead.

Chorus rumbles constant throughout night storied roots curl around obsidian arrowhead dissolved into shaft groove you unbuckle the stems from your leg Coda’s systemic sameness & design monsoon shovels clay onto hand pushes up arm, pericardial shift dams its build you prostrate in an office chair Massacre song foundation roll fields hypoxic grasses scribe a hill slope horripilation a pronghorn horns the air stirs skin cells Unpeel bison hide bundle piece stem into its chamber pillar a room with red cedar smoke Confusion forms to recall its palms air push different if not warranted you hear only past reflections bounce off the keystone surface: a beast skips on a butte thrown across a wheeling prairie oak shadow outline casts to your interior walls angled from captured leaf veins Unmoved trailer homes center scene cottonwoods bend your head you thumb forward then walk

To wave from the porch To let go of the grudge To disrobe To recall Ethel Rosenberg’s green polka-dotted dress To call your father and say I’d forgotten how nice everyone in these red states can be To hear him say Yes, long as you don’t move in next door To recall every drawn curtain in the apartments you have lived To find yourself at 33 at a vast expanse with nary a papyrus of 
guidance, with nary a voice, a muse, a model To finally admit out loud then I want to go home To have a dinner party of intellectuals with a bell, long-armed, lightly-tongued, at each setting To sport your dun gown To revel in face serums To be a well-calibrated burn victim to fight the signs of aging To assure financial health To be lavender sachets and cedar lining and all the ways the rich might hide their rot To eye the master’s bone china To pour diuretic in his coffee and think this erosive to the state To disrobe when the agent asks you to To find a spot on any wall to stare into To develop the ability to leave an entire nation thusly, just by staring at a spot on the wall, as the lead-vested agent names article by article what to remove To do this in order to do the other thing, the wild thing To say this is my filmdom, The Master’s House, and I gaze upon it and it is good To discuss desalinization plants and de terroir To date briefly a banker, a lapsed Marxist, and hear him on the phone speaking in billions of dollars, its residue over the clear bulbs of his eyes, as he turns to look upon your nudity To fantasize publishing a poem in the New Yorker eviscerating his little need To set a bell at each intellectual’s table setting ringing idea after idea, and be the simple-footed help, rushing to say Yes? To disrobe when the agent asks you to To find a spot on any wall to stare into To develop the ability to leave an entire nation thusly, just by staring at a spot on the wall To say this is my filmdom, The Master’s House To recall the Settler who from behind his mobile phone said I’m filming you for God To recall this sad God, God of the mobile phone camera, God of the small black globe and pixelated eye above the blackjack table at Harrah’s and the metal, toothed pit of Qalandia checkpoint the same To recall the Texan that held the shotgun to your father’s chest, sending him falling backward, pleading, and the words came to him in Farsi To be jealous of this, his most desperate language To lament the fact of your lamentations in English, English being your first defeat To finally admit out loud then I want to go home To stand outside your grandmother’s house To know, for example, that in Farsi the present perfect is called the 
relational past, and is used at times to describe a historic event whose effect is still relevant today, transcending the past To say, for example,Shah dictator bude-ast translates to The Shah was a dictator, but more literally to The Shah is was a dictator To have a tense of is-was, the residue of it over the clear bulb of your eyes To walk cemetery after cemetery in these States and nary a gravestone reading Solmaz To know no nation will be home until one does To do this in order to do the other thing, the wild thing, though you’ve forgotten what it was