for sonia

as if we did not lose another as if life were never so convenient and guns so easy to reach our country's so trigger happy these days or sad depending on who's dying today depending on the touch the moon raises my rivers yesterday i leaked all around the house a bad cough and a cloud looking over my shoulder as i wrote and though i cry i am celebrating a woman i love who loved me before i knew myself to be what blooms in the blood, what scratches the voice trembles words every day is a new mourning another fight we live to dance between tears beating on our faces i am tired of strength i am tired of strength when i first showed up to the community organizing meeting i uttered the word 'poetry' and their faces sunk with confusion who's got time for poems, when the worlds on fire and your brother's body on your front door and your sister's been missing for weeks and your dad got laid off and your mother gone mad with mothering and your uncle locked up and your aunt need a fix i mean, i mean life can get you down and out but when the organizers was weary and all the marching wore them down and all the meetings ended in arguments and all the foundations bought out the snakes and all the trauma piled up on their desks and all the campaigns ended with politicians i offered, i offered poems in their palms like petunias revolutionary and blushing shades of plum i fed them Sonia and Jane and June and Pat Parker and Carolyn Rodgers how every poem still pierces true like yesterdays battlefield is tomorrows front yard still still, all my hero's is fighting depression some live to see what they fought to prevent and we ought to keep our hopes high but all this comfort and security got our institutions kidnapped in broad daylight treaty torn and tricked bamboozled by the beaming brilliance of greed got our babies programmed for numbness content is and what is an enemy if we do not know who our friends are and who is a comrade these days when the poems are good depending on who reposts them depending on who's fetching for awards and who will feed our activists, our organizers freedom if not the poets? we are losing our front line warriors to suicide and is not choosing to fight a sort of sacrifice a kind of offering all our children have become alters to the liberation front the other day, the other day we lost Amber Evans baby girl found in the Scioto River she was 28 and before that it was Erica Garner heart full of storm and lightening she was 27 and before that it was Marshawn McCarrel on the steps of the Ohio statehouse haunted by the hunting he was 23 Bassem Masri, Bassem Masri our Palestinian brother from another mother what about what about Ferguson and Edward Crawford and Darren Seales and how dreams still smell of teargas and milk we cry we cry trumpets and turntables in the corners of our hopes we rhythm and blues and though i cry and though i cry and though i cry i am celebrating a woman i love she who turned the pen in her hand to a grenade haiku homegirl folklore florist flung stories into our minds planted orchids and daffodils sunflowers she who, she who shivered the sky rain showers and sunsets born of her blessing the flesh of her words kindred sister who wrote for daughters of a movement who say, do and act the call response resist riot of our rebellious laughter as we readied our reasons for writing we armed ourselves with her poems a strategy for organizing the heart prophetic prayers a smile made of spirituals and birth pains these days these days, it hurts to write every sentence is a false promise is we, or is we not trying to get free and when the poems do what they do they get it done Sister Sanchez eternal fellow fire spitter bad i mean bad i mean bad to the bone i never met a poet who loved us like you do all of us and when my anger knocks the wind out of my weeping i sit on the hills of your humming words and feast of all the ways, we got to get to where we're going in the quiet mirror of a poem how to be human how to shake loose arms outstretched summoning us, uncool and truth telling care how to heal in the cathedral of hands this is a poem for you and for us for all the poems that sistered us in this ancestral war all the lines somersaulting sister Sister Sanchez you are our North Star in our darkest nights