#BlackLivesMatter to Poets

Poets are rising to the cause, hands raised (“Don’t shoot!”) but hands also holding pencils and paper or at the computer keys, writing poems.

The cause I refer to is clear to anyone who has lived in this country since August 9, 2014, the date of Michael Brown’s murder. It’s not a new cause, alas; racial injustice has never been absent from our land.

But what’s new—and hopeful—is the depth and breadth of public outcry. It had actually begun a couple weeks earlier, with the caught-on-camera police choking of Eric Garner, then swelled as Michael Brown’s dead body lay for four and a half hours in the street.

Then in late November-early December, the swell became a roar of indignation, as black Americans felt slap after slap after slap on the face of their worth as human beings: on November 22, the police killing (“when will they ever learn?”) of twelve-year old Tamir Rice, playing in a public park; on November 24, the non-indictment of the police officer who killed Brown; on December 3, the non-indictment of the police officer who had choked Eric Garner to death.

Poets, both black and white, are lending their particular poetic voice to the outcry. Or, I should say, “voices,” since the poetic voices are diverse. There’s the bitter irony of David Almaleck Wolinsky‘s “Lament for Darren Wilson and Tamir Rice (Thanksgiving, 2014)”:

Precious, precious, precious.
The lives of killers are precious;
they are prisms of truth.

They are because they are.
They are as lives are
precious, sanctus, precious,
the lives of killers
and the lives ended,

oh listeners in whom they must live.

There’s the pensive pain of “I Don’t Pretend to Know All the Facts” by Shevaun Brannigan, dedicated to Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden:

          What it’s like to be a mother,     what it’s like
to want to give someone all the good in the whole world…
          If I knew what it was like to be a mother,
I hope I would not know what it was like to suddenly not be a mother,
          (though an embankment is still an embankment even after the river is gone,
the embankment still remembers the feel of water against it,
          still curves to make room for the water and all it contained).…
          I don’t pretend to know how many mothers are watching
TV now, terrified of the world they have gifted to the sons they will lose
          in upcoming months, I do not know who is next,
but I do not pretend that some boy will not be next,
          and here he is, 12 years old in Cleveland and now not in Cleveland,
                    though I do not pretend to know what happens after death,
I have been told of heaven just as I have been told of the water cycle,
          that an evaporated river is held in our clouds, our bodies,
each tear,
          though mothers, I don’t pretend that will bring you comfort.  

Then there’s Maureen Doalles’s “one nation,” taking on the prophetic, oracular voice of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, quoted from as the poem’s epigraph:

for one hundred years
hope was tranquilizing

despair a mountain
of solid stone in hands
crippled by manacles

but we emerge now
not drinking from a cup
of hatred, of violence

of bitterness, not jangling
chains of distrust
but able to sing here today

our protests in community
battered, suffering, we will
not turn back…

These poems and many more are published online:

A call for poems on racial injustice sent out by the website Split This Rock, resulted in some thirty-five poems posted over several days beginning December 9, 2014. (The poems above are from this site.)

Nicholas Kristof launched a poetry contest on his New York Times blog; as of the December 18 deadline, over 260 poems had been posted.

Winter Tangerine Review has called for poems on the theme of “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” exploring what it means to be black in America. They’ll be published on February 5, 2015, in honor of Trayvon Martin’s birthday.

And Power Poetry has been printing a wealth of poems about race.

Reading through this outpouring of poetic sense—in the face of the insensitivity of racial profiling and police impunity—I recall a previous outbreak of poems appealing to the conscience of our country. As President George W. Bush prepared for his “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq in late 2002, poet Sam Hamill happened to be among the poets whom Laura Bush invited to the White House for a February symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice.”

Knowing that his own voice at the symposium would be strongly against the President’s military plans, Hamill emailed a few poet-friends to ask for poems he might read there. Within a few weeks he’d received poems from about eleven thousand people (via email forwarding in those pre-twitter and Facebook days); poetsagainstthewar.org was set up; and Laura Bush cancelled her symposium.

Inspired by Poets Against the War, I compiled an anthology for Pax Christi USA in 2005 called Imagine a World: Poetry for Peacemakers, my title borrowed from the opening of Scott Cairns’s “The Theology of Delight”:

Imagine a world, this ridiculous,
tentative bud blooming
in your hand…

Yes, imagine it. Our world is ridiculous and tentative…yet it is a bud blooming in your hand: your hand holding pencil and paper or at the computer keys, writing poems. Poets find language to tell it like it is, but also language to tell it as it might be.

Can poetry move us toward a post-racial world? Not alone. But it can join its voices to the marches for justice, laying its lines on the line, blossoming #BlackLivesMatter into a fuller picture of indignities suffered…and further into a vision of how a world with dignity for all might look.

Peggy Rosenthal is director of Poetry Retreats and writes widely on poetry as a spiritual resource. Her books include Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times (Franciscan Media), and The Poets’ Jesus (Oxford). See Amazon for full list. She also teaches an online course, “Poetry as a Spiritual Practice,” through Image’s Glen Online program.

Photo above by Rose Colored Photo, used under a Creative Commons License.