A Litany: From the Struggle

A Litany: From the Struggle

The sheer intensity of the struggle and marching with elbows locked,

Their feet moved to the rhythm of justice’s beat,

In the face of oppression, they never refused to quit.

With heads held high, and hearts crowded with fire,

They marched for freedom, and love was their North Star.

Through valleys of hatred, and mountains of pain, Pressing ever forward, resolve never waned.

From Montgomery’s streets to Birmingham’s jails, their voices constantly echoing as their courage intensified.

with unnerving grace, These paragons of liberation were terrorized with water hoses and dogs,

Their spirits unbroken knowing they were the hallowed ground, the sacred space.

And in the midst of this tumult, stood an Alpha man of the Black & Gold, A beacon of hope, the voice crying in the wilderness.

Dr. King, with his dream, lighting the way, Inspiring the marchers, come and enter into the beauty of U-N-I-T-Y. U-N-I-T-Y that’s a unity

With eloquence and passion, he emoted a dream, Where all would be equal, and justice would gleam.

His words untethered the soul from mediocrity.

Unity was his proclamation and settled upon freedom’s consecrated ground.

Forty stanzas may not be enough to disclose,

The narrations of courage, where life was lost and stolen

But in each of these line, we carve out a little space of joy,

Regardless of what still “looms but the horror of the shade,”

A glaring legacy, a magisterial presence.

With courage and rectitude, he fought the good fight,

We bury not our head and forget not.

Those weary ambiances peering through the veil saying,

“Show them who you are”

So we honor them with every breath

As much as we can conceive what honor resembles.

Because his words like poetry restructured our souls

Which is the testimonial to the power of love’s art.

On the canvas of injustice, he painted morals of hope,

Words were his paint brush

and his inspiration were the thousands of

marchers

locked in the struggle

Embracing his vision, conquering death.

For in the beauty of Dr. King’s legacy,

We find the true essence of humanity.

So let us remember, these beautiful souls who travailed,

With bravery and honor, their battles wrought.

And let us honor, Dr. King’s lasting grace, In the tapestry of history, in

the words of the great Toni Morrison knowing that the function of freedom is to free someone else.

Hiding: A Liminal SPace

There are moments when certain words or phrases strike me as urgent. Today as I was reading through, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon, I was suspended in time by his words, “Hiding won’t protect us.” What does it mean to hide? Am I hiding in order to cower away from a threat or evil? Or, am I hiding to ambush a threat or evil? Nonetheless, hiding is only temporary solution; it is a liminal space. 

One can never redeem freedom while hiding. Creativity is stifled in hiding. Comparatively, hiding is different, spacelely, than being alone. Baldwin surmises that the “primary distinction of the artist is that [they]must actively cultivate that state which most [people], necessarily, avoid: the state of being alone.” Creativity needs room which hiding doesn’t easily avail or lend itself towards. The creatives, artist, and those who understand freedom use the banality of aloneness as a space to exhume what humanity is afraid of being— simply an authentic, descent human. It the artist, as Baldwin declares, that affords us the opportunity to know “that there is nothing stable under heaven.”

Hiding forces one to compartmentalize to much of their beauty. It endorses the instability of chaos due to the lack of presence. Hiding is a relentless appeal to avert dealing with reality.

“Hiding won’t protect us.” Were the words Laymon wrote to his mother.  

I felt that…

Waiting

The sensation of waiting is an open wound. The scriptures use such verbiage as, “They that wait on the Lord shall…” It gives this guarantee that if you stand-by, something is bound to happen. This is why I use a wound as an intended imagery of waiting because something is happening—whether noticed or not. The wound is either healing or becoming infected. Waiting produces a kind of knowledge that one cannot and does not get through conventional forms of learning. This epistemological relaxation—the wait— places one in the ever-present reality of dealing with self.

Created Failure

Perfection is an oddly, strange presentation and, oftentimes, unbelievable. Though we claim we want perfection, but if we ever experienced it ,our first response would be there is something deceptive happening here –it is to good to be true. Maybe what we are really striving toward is what Ashon Crawley describes as this “created failure,” or this way of imagining that which re-imagines even the imagined. Even reality has spaces that function in pedestrian sense yet never capture the essence of the culture. The focus is always how do we pose the right thing at the right time, to produce. It rarely is about a simple vibe that may not produce for years. 

What I have notice over the past few years of viewing social media is that most people posting for things to go viral find that their post fall flat on their face. Because the things that most often go viral are the things that are actual failures. And from those failures or miscues people began to see brilliance within the re-imagining of those failures. It is Dizzy Gillespie damaging his horn and the bell being turned up. He never fixes the horn but continues to play because he liked the sound. Once others heard and viewed this created failure within this trumpet, music companies started manufacturing horns with this defect.

Perfection is an illusion that misinforms the creative spirit into conforming into a mechanism focused on production rather liberation.     

Love, in the RADICAL

I often wonder can a people who were enslaved really love their oppressors. Is that really grace and justice?;— or, is that mere foolishness. Love conjures one into an imaging, where imitation becomes an emblem of honor and respect. Therefore, to love your oppressors means you then must assemble some of their characteristics: greed, malice, hatred, strife, selfishness, etc. 

I am not being overzealous with my approach, but love is not a flexible concept. It has to be rigid in its function but comfortable in its application. So, a slave master can’t love his slaves and slaves can’t love their slave master. In the case of the slave, it’s simply fear. They mimicked the slave master in order to be invisible. (As I stated earlier, love is about imaging and imitating.) Invisibility, not in the sense of not being viewed, but in the sense of not being seen. Because once a slaved was seen, their humanity was validated, which, subsequently, led to the slave master feeling the need to dehumanize the slave. So, the slave must mimic the characteristic and desires of the slave master in order to survive. Therefore, the functioning of love has no type of comfortability assigned within its bandwidth.

Understand, love never has to concede its function in order to be comfortable, it just is.

Love is a renegade thought in an immoral, uncivilized society. It absolutely makes no sense why Black people should even consider love as an option within a white supremacist system like America. Violence feels like the best response, but violence yields unmitigated consequences usually equating to social death of some form. Therefore, love re-enters, and consumes the room in its revolutionary posture: strong, vibrant, beautiful and protecting, by any means necessary.