Oracles

Response from Apple Farm writer/poet Amy Carpenter, Grand Rapids, MI


Daily there are voices in the streets,
the voices of the marginalized
in the fight for their lives.

Also heard is the Tao
making no sound.

The loud-then-quiet oracles of Black parents
crying over their dead children.

At night, I dream the voices
of people I don’t know.
They walk across a field.

My own voice joins the shout:
the people united, will never be divided!

In the woods, the snow falls,
speaks its own language.

Justice*, reinvisioned as a large queer Black woman,
cries out, fist raised, surrounded by her people.  

The wind weaves a story,
my memory fills in the voice.

Later, in circle, an Anishinaabe elder
tells me stories of the strawberry, of Turtle Island.

I hear the land
and the land knows me, a colonizer.

Black and brown folks sit in circles,
speak healing between themselves,
the ancestors, the land.

I hear water,
how it pours and splashes.

Justice rumbles if
white folks refuse to be a part of violence.  
I hear the sound of dismantling.

The Tao makes no sound,
does by not doing.

*Image: Justice, from the Next World Tarot by Cristy C Road, https://goo.gl/images/oDRrTD-Amy Carpenter

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