“The Storm” (A Poem)

By Noah Streng

Footsteps on the hot, cracked pavement

Tires on the road, fighting enslavement

The organizers trek into the field

Their spirits hopeful, their souls healed

Listening to the throes of workers’ woes

From wartime tales, hopelessness arose

The organizers turn despair into dignity

Moving workers to action, their words electricity

The power they sought was within them all along

Together united, they could be strong

Endless, bountiful, radical love as deep as the boundless sea

Who could have known what they could be?

Ocean waves crash upon the ports of power

Awaiting their demise, bosses sit in their tower

With each passing second, the waves start to rumble

Stone by stone, the frail walls crumble

Awash with forgotten, unrecognized pain

The crackling of thunder, the pounding of rain

The organizers march on, their strength astounding

Their footsteps drum pavement, pattering and pounding

A chorus of giants, the tower shatters

Bosses weep as their power scatters

Galloping waves fill every crack, every crevice

Those who were legless are running the fastest

Freedom!

The tower is gone

What stands in its place, an open field, a new dawn

Ripe soil, pregnant with possibility

Dreams of the forgotten are now reality

Birds sing, flowers bloom

The voiceless are the chorus, their hopes boom

Freedom.

The organizers part, their journey completed

The swift storm delivering what was needed

What began in haste is now at an end

Who could have known what would happen to them?

Their quest to transform has left them changed

Their bond unbreakable, their love unrestrained

Tires sear the open road once more

The pavement awaits, the oceans roar

Their kinship eternal, their battle won

With strength in numbers, anything can be done

Revealed in community lies the beauty of humanity

Unbridled by fear, they are stronger than gravity

The old world is gone, the new world is born

What once seemed impossible, made real by the storm

Our future awaits, our destiny inevitable

Together we stand, our power incredible

Through love,

Through tears,

Through laughter,

Through pain,

United, we are the pouring rain

The organizers turn despair into dignity

Moving themselves to action, they love unconditionally

The power they hold as bountiful as the sea

Who could have known what they could be?

Decolonizing the American Mind: A Review of Matt Sedillo's "Mowing Leaves of Grass"

By Jon Jeter

Had Amiri Baraka been born 50 years later to a Chicano family in Southern California rather than a black family in Newark, he would’ve been Matt Sedillo. 

Present in the work of both poets –the late icon and the relative ingenue respectively –is the rhythmic mixture, una mezcla, of the street, and minds sharpened, like swords, by struggle, and self-enlightenment.

This is not to suggest that Sedillo’s poetry is all fire and brimstone. Like Baraka before him, Sedillo infuses his poetry with a certain knowing, or playfulness, befitting an outsider who is in on the joke, and has seen through the illogic of a handful of Europeans “discovering” 90 million indigenous people. The white settler’s arrogance produces both amusement and blinding, righteous, anger. 

And so it is that Sedillo’s second book of poetry, Mowing Leaves of Grass, reads like a criminal indictment handed up by, well, a poet. In the book’s first poem, entitled Pilgrim, he writes:

See, I come from struggle

And if my story offends you

That is only ‘cause you made the mistake of seeking your

reflection

In my self-portrai

In one of the book’s shorter poems, Pedagogy of the Oppressor, it is made abundantly clear that Sedillo’s poetry is, at its core, an attempt to decolonize the American mind:

And when they read  

They read in conquest 

And when they thought 

They thought of process 

And when they wrote  

Again and again  

It was the word progress 

And when they spoke  

A festival of bayonets 

Impaled the audience  

Line the children  

It’s getting late November  

Teach them Pilgrim  

Teach them Indian  

Speak of gratitude  

Speak of friendship 

Of all the usual suspects perp-walked by Mowing Leaves of Grass, however, the kingpin is Walt Whitman, whose storied 1855 book of poems, Leaves of Grass, is the inspiration of Sedillo’s book title. Widely regarded by ivory-towered elites as the greatest book of poetry in the history of the Republic –or the genre’s Huck Finn – Leaves of Grass is considered a siren song, calling for a young and yearning nation of castoffs and cut-ups to unite in the democratic experiment that is America. 

Sedillo, however, makes no claim to the mantle of poet-laureate but rather dissident laureate, and he finds Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, like the nation itself,  wanting, and in need of a reappraisal. Why, he seems to ask in Mowing Leaves of Grass, is Whitman so fawned over and feted when he fails to account for the suffering, the despair, or the rivers of blood spilled by Native Americans, and blacks, in the making of the nation?

In his poem titled “Oh Say,” Sedillo remixes stanzas from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,  lyrics to the anthems Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful, and the dirge popularized by Billie Holliday, Strange Fruit.

So we were bound 

To keep singing 

Oh captain 

My captain 

Drunk on blood anthems Blind patriots 

Raised flags 

And fallen veterans 

The myths 

The hymns 

The bitterness 

Of fairy tales 

Best woven into song 

From the dawn’s 

Early light 

To twilight’s last gleaming From Plymouth Rock 

To Dred Scott 

From smallpox 

To church bomb 

From black bodies 

Swinging in the summer breeze To the endless blood 

Of countless wounded knees Old glory 

We are born 

Witness 

To the sins of your soil 

Oh pioneer

I’ve never heard Sedillo recite his poetry live but I am told by those who have that he is electric, inhabiting the words, owning the room,  spitting fire and truth much as Baraka did in his day, but to a rapid-fire, staccato, hip-hop beat rather than Baraka’s jazzy cadence. The writer Greg Palast calls him the best political poet in America, and while I’m not in any position to agree or disagree, I can say that his poems leave me feeling ennobled, and less alone in the world.

Sedillo’s voice is defiant, irreverent, even wrathful, but his metier is championing the cause of the unwashed, and the unloved, be they Chicanos, African Americans, Indonesian sweatshop workers, or Palestinians. And the irony is that what shines through in Mowing the Leaves, more than anything is not of a poet seething at the injustice of it all, but besotted with the people. From his poem, Once:

I have this dream

Every so often

Of people

Beyond borders and prisons

Gathered in the distance

Telling tales of a time

When women feared the evening

When communities were punished by color

And grown men hunted children

Hardly able to believe

People once lived this way

Jon Jeter is a former Washington Post correspondent and the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama’s Postracial America.

What to the African American is the Fourth of July?

[PHOTO CREDIT: BOSTON GLOBE]

By Christian Gines

I. Every time a firecracker pops I think of every pop of a whip that cracked a back of my ancestor
An uncle or aunt
A cousin
A best friend

Every whip that drove my people
Deeper
*Whip*
Deeper
*Whip*
Deeper
Into oppression
Every whip that moved my parents
One step farther from their homeland
And closer to their new land
A land that’s not really theirs
Where they are a troublesome presence
A land where they are 3/5 of a person
“A slave”
“A nigger”
“A coon”
“A boy”
“A negro”
“A convict”
“A drug dealer”
“A thug”
A
ME

II. Every time a firecracker pops I can hear their fingers pop
The blood seeping out
A paper cut
But from thorns
The same color of the white stuff that they make out of trees 
But the white that makes the white people a lot of money 
The pop that makes me want to complain and get Band-Aid 
But the pop that if they didn’t keep picking then they would be DEAD
I think of the crackling heat of that day
Gleaming on their flared backs
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

III. Every time a firecracker pops I think of the popped naps
The naps from the black panther party that uncurled into an Afro
The naps of my people that remains
Un kept
Un picked
Un bothered
To reflect that we are from our homeland Africa
To reflect that we belong here in America
To show that we shouldn’t be defined by our haircuts or our skin color
To show that when we pick our hair it is a symbol of black power
And that power doesn’t have to infringe on anyone else
For some reason I have to say that
But when you’re accustomed to privilege
Equality feels like oppression
When I pop my knuckles I think of all the black women that struggle with their natural hair 
That need to pop their naps to fit into what society preaches
So they can seem intelligent and smart
So they can be accepted into a society that stresses how they can and should look

IV. Every time a firecracker pops I think of the hanging nooses
The nooses that have my brothers head hanging in them 
That pop
One piece of rope at a time it pops
Waiting on the limb to break
POP
There it goes again
Another black boy dead
When I pop my knuckles I think of the gunshots that go off unexpectedly
One that didn’t have to happen
One that makes another black boy disappear from this earth like nothing ever happens
And when I pop my knuckles I think of
99% percent of those gavels that leave those officers convicted of nothing
And how this criminal justice system fails us
Time and time again
And when I pop my knuckles I think of the moment when that time will stop
And a pop will sound but
It will be a firework of equality and justice
Spreading across the world one by one
On a path that will stop only when that pop is a firework on June 19th not July 4th

V. Every time a firecracker pops I think of Thurgood Marshall and his fight for equality
I think of him hitting his gavel as the first black on the Supreme Court of the United States of America
When I pop my knuckles I think of the jails locked forever
The mass incarceration of African Americans
I think of the closing of MLK’s jail cell and the letters he sent from there
I think of the killings of 
Medgar Evers
Malcolm X

Fred Hampton

Patrice Lumumba
Laquon McDonald
Eric Garner
Sandra Bland
Freddie Gray

Trayvon Martin
Stephon Clark

Sandra Bland
Kaleif Browner

Ahmaud Arbery

George Floyd

Breonna Taylor

Oluwatoyin Salau

 VI. Every time a firecracker pops I think of the last poll closing on election night in 2008 
Black people were lynched for this right
I think of the opening of the White House door
And the hope that came with it
The dream that we could become a better America

VII. Every time a firecracker pops I think of Crispus Attucks
The first person killed in the Revolutionary war
A black person
Not even fighting for his own freedom
We have fought in every American war
We are more likely to join the army than any other race
But we're still not seen as American
Yet you still hate us
You brought us over here yet you hate us
We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American.
But like Langston Hughes said
“They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed —/I, too, am America.”

Intersections (A Poem)

By Suzanne Adely

As global NGO regimes strengthen, movement spaces become increasingly de-politicized. In the U.S. one of the most striking examples of de-politicized 'activism' is the almost complete lack of acknowledgment of US Empire and its' political, social and economic manifestations around the globe. To organize today one must regard identity and intersectionality above all else, yet the most valuable elements of those ideas have been distorted. This poem is a response to self identified 'radical' colleagues who use the language of intersectionality to control political discussion, while refusing to see the intersections of Empire. This poem is also inspired by the memories of all that has passed in the Arab world in my lifetime.

I

his name
a relic
its letters tracing
brilliant memories
of time passing
in squares

her name was a thought
a recognition
every pronouncement
a dream
of bright courtyards
and green almonds

All of we,
All of us,
find ourselves
in the outline
hear ourselves
in the echoes

names and their memories
kept alive
in the margins
kept alive
deeper than our core
farther than our borders

II

his forsaken evening
my solitary morning
on the burning screen
he asks, tudkari?
yes habibi I do
la habibi, I don't

the sweetest sour
the brightest dark
her name was a relic
his name a thought
a knowledge
a dream

Haidar
Maryam
Omar & Nerdeen
Ali, Muhannad & Ayoub

treasured names
thrown
shattered
muted syllables
unrecognized
in this brooklyn room

Haidar
Maryam
Omar & Nerdeen
Ali, Muhannad & Ayoub

did you know they pictured their lives in color?
like the deep red earth around them

that they dreamt of their futures in song?
beats, melody and verse

that they held their cousins
with the tenderness of a mother?
as soon as their arms could unfold

​vanished

from our arms
over and over and over again
in darkness, at dawn
in spring ,winter and the autumn
in summer

'I never dreamed you'd leave in summer.'

names are hostile memories

III

a brooklyn room
an invitation
forced,
distorted intersections
a token to your well-funded identity

we pronounce their names
and tell the stories
of their well-funded death
the vicious intersections
of their well-funded death

pronounced
without knowledge,
thought or recognition
in hostile silence

names
are muted
shattered
unrecognized
fading to whiteness
in this brooklyn room

Suzanne Adely is a long time Arab-American community organizer from southwest Yonkers. I became a middle school teacher for several years before working for the Arab American Action Network in Chicago. By mid-life, I became a lawyer and global labor organizer. I have been blessed to live and work and witness movements and struggles in NY, Chi-town, MENA region and India. Some of my organizational affiliations are: Al-Awda-NY, US Palestine Community Network , Labor4Palestine, Global Workers Solidarity Network.