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Oracles

3/20/2019

1 Comment

 
Picture
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

1 Comment
Jo Marie Thompson
3/31/2019 10:22:53 am

The weaving of voices in your poem seems not to leave anything out - I appreciate the expansive clarity of it. There is a current of integrating wisdom to it.

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    ...it is in part by our response to the great stories of the world  that we too can begin to find, each of us this individual story expressing the symbolic meaning behind the facts of our fate and behind the motives that determine the day-to-day choices of our lives.  -Helen Luke, The Inner Story

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