Poetry

March/April 2006

Featured Story

The Front Lines of Creativity
Poetry by contributors Maia Williams Carpenter, Danae Davis, Hawah, Nizar Wattad

“In our modern world the artist is tempted simply to do stunts in order to attract attention. But the true task of the artist is to discover her or his relationship to a community, a community often in desperate need of the artist’s power to see the world anew.” – Historian Page Smith, from the foreword to Art in Other Places: Artists at Work in America’s Community & Social Institutions

Equatorial Sun

By Maia Williams Carpenter

The U.N. people
Stay in their trucks
Black insults
Thrown too much
To walk into
The blazing huts
Of hell

America is having nightmares
Bared
Shared with the world
I dare myself to cry
But tear ducts
Are frozen by the leer
Of another man
Thousands of women
Are telling thousands of women
Stories
Survivors ascending
Out of flesh and jail

Buried
In mounds
Underneath flexible trees
They ask me
Where I am from

Red white and blue
American Pie the DVD
And snow
When I get home
The heart of darkness
Recedes into the night sky
Mythology
Of a Congo
In chains
And slave
Gangs with no name
Shame with no money

Can’t destroy the gun game
So the living is forgotten
Can’t name the life
That you’ve bought in
That’s what its like to be dark
In light of the logic of economics
That is cutting
The necks of rape survivors
On fire
Pregnant and bartered
We’ve fallen into oblivion
Never reciting
The deaths of these martyrs

The innocent mothers
Street children quartered
In war
Every language creates
The difference between women
And whore

They call themselves
Same as they called me
Sister
Mama
Messenger

The U.S. buys men
And women
And plays war with itself

In America world
We tune out the world
By turning on the news
We could choose to refuse
The good news
That somebody’s war
Is our gain
Our reign on this earth

And the 4th world
Will emerge like herds
Of gazelles running
Through the hills
Of the U.S. dollar bills
Military’s territorial hell
Who are gangbanging
Women to prove
They have something
Left to spill

In the 4th world
Tupac is born hundreds
Of times day
And he prays to his mama
Not the voice
Of the voiceless
But of the choices
To enjoy life even when
She’s loaded with 50 kg
Of manoc and groceries
Lives like fallen rice
Women who
Look like the women who hold me
Through the tears
That I’m hiding

In my dreams
The Congo is wider
Than an equatorial
Bird’s wings
Soaring over diamond
Petal flowers
And gold studded trees
Richer than mahogany
Feet stomping
Out a drum beat
And the women survivors
Are dancing with their children
Singing for amani
That leaves them breathless
Rather than helpless
With the bones of the deathless
They are building
A civil society

In my dreams
Blinded by
The cover of a war
That we created
But we still refuse
To see

In the Congo
The black light shines
In the middle of the day
Women sway in layers
Of peacock colors
And the young men
In mismatched military
Take-those-offs
Carry their gun by the barrel
Over the shoulders
Whistling Dixie
Caught in the reflection
Of what we are willing to believe
Of just one more survivor’s
Dream

Maia Williams Carpenter is a poet, vocalist, dancer, workshop leader, and spiritual worker who has traveled around Africa and the Middle East with the Christian Peacemaker Teams. Her one-woman show, My Anger Means Pain and Survival, utilizes poetry, storytelling, song, movement, and meditation to discuss global struggles for justice and to challenge herself and others to daily recommit to dismantling the oppression that enslaves all of us.

Bombs Don’t Solve Problems

By Hawah

Bombs don’t solve problems and really our enemies are but misunderstood friends.

We are together
—in this war, in this celebration, in this amalgamation of reality—
placing our egos to the side and living briefly
with our hearts open to the
DREAM

IMAGINE
Not everyone will feel as you feel…
but even if we disagree, we still have to live together…
that is the reality.
So let me say finally,
with courage and belief,
that I love my parents,
and my uncle,
An alcoholic who beat his wife

I love my friends also,
just as I love my teachers,
and that bully on the playground who she saved me from.

Yes, could you believe it?
I love George W. Bush and I love Osama Bin Laden.
Both equally.
Without distinction, or reservation.

I’m even moved so far to say that I love Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld
The winter as much as the spring

And, yes, of course,
I love You.
Each and Every One of You

Because
People we are one in the same,
I have resolved to love the people who are most hated,
because they also need to know that someone cares about them…

Although I may not agree with their actions I see,
It is impossible to exist
Separate from someone else.
—by placing blame on another for the problems we are facing—
We are prevented from solving and evolving
Transforming our present world life-situation
Which we are all equally responsible for
Creating
a new consciousness

There will be peace on earth,
When police no longer beat protestors with clubs and
protestors no longer call police pigs.

But let me return to the beginning
I’m walking in forgiveness
There is a way out of the cycle of violence…
There are no enemies
There is, however, a force that paralyzes our evolution
Hatred.
And a force that births our existence
Love.

Hawah is a multimedia artist – a painter, photographer, spoken word artist, and Internet activist – who is the author of Trust Before Suspicion and zerONEss. For more information visit www.everlutionary.net.

slingshot

By Nizar Wattad

all I ever needed, man
was an olive tree with a branch in the shape of a Y
cut it off
shape that thing right
take the rubber from a soccer ball,
lash it on tight
place a rock against the rubber
pray
bless it with flight

I’m like children with stones
living a lone existence with no rest
or respite from the pressure fight
listen:

call me Slingshot
Hip-Hop
sing for your freedom, shake it off
Intifada ‘till they bring you your freedom through Jerusalem’s gates
flown over walls and gravestones
brave souls that should’ve stayed home

same song: days are long when your babies are gone
I hear you crying to the night mama try and be strong
I see you leaning on your Bible and your Holy Qur’an
place your faith in these poems you
can never go wrong either way:

the way to heaven ain’t with weapons
or bombs strapped to your chest an alarm
set to death, blasting you off like their
Kalashnikovs right there
is the issue:

you kill that makes you just like them, now is you?
and what about the family that’ll miss you?

answer the question, yo
Salaam always follows a calm so stop stressing so
press your foe to the wall
leave an impression
meshing your hopes with aggression lessen
your anger and pain:

find the peace within yourself to bring the same to the plains
hills and valleys of death
bloody foam in the ocean
lines at checkpoints extending to gates
that won’t open
your fate
is fore-chosen so you wait for the end
feeling pressure
from above
like the page
to the pen
amen

Nizar Wattad is a Palestinian-American screenwriter and hip-hop artist living in Los Angeles, California. His poetry, fiction and nonfiction writing can be accessed via The Philistines’s Web site (www.thephilistines.com).

Peace in this State?

By Danae Davis

I’m tired of people screaming
“Those people just need to pull themselves up by their boot straps!”
Cause I been pulling like hell for years and my straps keep breaking
Instead of fussing at poor folk for being poor
Yall need to start screaming for universal education and healthcare
A land where we don’t need no welfare
Let’s get hungry for tax breaks and earthquakes
That will crack the foundation of capitalism
Lead the way towards corporate decay
Open the door to the demise of the prison industrial complex
No more filling cells like slave ships…Poorly educated nigga on top of poorly educated nigga.
Reclaim that old cliché and start shouting “NO JUSTICE NO PEACE!”
Recoup this culture of violence and redefine peace
Peace is smooth like an angry lion
Captivating like the silence before he pounces.
Weren’t you listening when the King told us, It’s far from the absence of tension
If you’re on the side of peace we can do without your snide apprehension
Slow to judgment and violence yes, but quick to confront and challenge
and you must have endurance cause this struggle takes stamina
the will to with stand the nay sayers who doubt
this Culture of violence will ever change
Those who’ve grown accustomed to living on the edge of fear and manipulation
They fear change enough to remain silent supporters of their own enslavement
Sealing their bonds with every wave of the bloody flag
Tightening their chains with every ballot cast for the better of two evils.
They say all we got to do is stop the violence
Well my friends some depend on violence to make they ends meet.
No young in don’t speak. Mediate on it. Think about the state we living in.
Worshipping blood stained diamond rings
Living in the P.J.’s dreaming about escalades
Buying fake spinners claiming we fabulous
Better than the rest, this is America nothing but the best
World’s super power with an ego to match
You even think about surpassing us
We’ll have to mount another preemptive attack
No young in don’t speak. Mediate on it. Think about the state we living in.
It’s us versus the terrorist.
You tell me how the thousand of women and children who will die are a danger to us.
It doesn’t matter. The bombs don’t drop near us so in the U.S. war has mass appeal
Their too ignorant to know what they really need
We’ll bring them democracy and a few corporations to sweeten the deal
They’ll thank us in the long run
A brand new government and plenty of businessmen eager to get richer of the rebuild.
A democratic Iraq or a new American colony
It doesn’t really matter because in America War has mass appeal.
Young poorly educated blacks and Latinos get to go off and become men
Corporations get entire cities to rebuild and public utilities to privatize.
Complete with desperate, war torn, cheap labor force.
Best of all American mothers get their boys in casket bound uniforms
He signed up for an education and a chance to see the world
Straight to desert into hostile territory
A pawn in the struggle for oil and dominance.
Back in a body bag. He was a good soldier… at least that’s what the obituary said.
Rest in Peace
No youngin don’t speak. Mediate on it. Think about the state we living in.
This state where peace is only understood beyond the grave.

Danae Davis, 22, serves as a 2005-06 FOR Freeman Intern, helping to organize Peacemaker Training Institutes fo r the Nonviolent Youth Collective, outreach for the "I Will Not Kill" campaign, and FOR visibility in national events such as the September 2005 anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. Danae, a graduate of Messiah College (Pa.) is interested in using African-American history and culture as the foundation for teaching social and economic justice in her community.