the invitation (2006)

The invitation (2006)

Was invited to your party
via the backdoor

watching
KTLN today
setting the record straight
on american history in Black and White

a dancing timeline of "truth"
reminded me
that republicans
are the party
of stoic Abraham Lincoln
the party that stood agiants the Kansas Missouri Expansion
the party that defied Dred Scott
embracing equality
with open arms


and
disarmed those damned confederates

and

I
had visions of
shirley temple's
chubby hands
feeding her scortched
friend
cake from the porch
with a sweet smile

I
guess i should
confess
that
I am
grateful
that
they
were not like other
men of their time

after all
them other donkeys
well they support
the right
for 35 out of every 100 black babies
to stuck in the "new" middle passage

but most kishas and kenyas
and chantes I know
had their babies, despite the odds
and
who
knows
how
many black babies
lie suspended in inertia,
wanted
by their mamas
and wanted
by the law


So I sit, perplexed and read
the words to an invitation
that my great-great grandparents could not

Abraham Lincoln, who preserved the union
but owned slaves
and thought they were too unclean to
shake hands

the party that
supported the freedom of slaves
to be sharecroppers
and borrowed their freedom
from their children
to build
a pyramid
for the eagle to rest

the party that
stuck
a foot out
in front
of 100,000 marchers
and hosed
children in birmingham
until flesh tore form skin
and then prayed for them

the party of
disproportionate sentencing
the war on drugs
the war on values
the war on terror

and peace on earth

the party
that watched
as new orleans
became black atlantis
black bodies
hanging
in the
wind
sun scortching their southern skin


yes,
I guess
I should be grateful
my invitation
was not lost
in the mail

It only takes one step to move from fear to faith.

back (2006)

sometimes, it stays gone
then it
comes back
the uncured cold....

Woke up this morning
With you


Steeling
secret spaces
soft lights
Sweet
like sun tea

content with
mock
satisfaction

You came bearing
Gifts
time

memory
Opening
Me
wide

it all comes back--

Marmalade colored sunsets
Ago
When
You drank
Delightful
And delicious
The best
I had to offer
quenched your thirst
And left the cup
That showered the floor
With beauty and bitterness

I seek out
Memories of
Give and take are
Loose like change
For a long bumpy buds ride

This buys me time.
in this space
love is
spicy
sweet
tart

served not on silver
but
flawed
but sparkling
cracked glass work

lovers dine as
yellow winds
rage against
against a red storm
each refusing to give

I see the future by
Remembering the past
bluegirl
Shaking
Afraid
To deny
You

I hold
Hoping
That you
Will be the one
Who will fight
And not allow me
To walk away
but I hear no “wait”
and so
I breathe again

This
love
bigger than
need
lifted by
Faith
bruised by hope
cast
out of
eden


And so I allow my sweater to slip over my shoulder
And show skin

Then

I see
That pinwheel space
In the center
of your eye
against a dim sky


a soft peace touches my bare back
you look at me
the way
I want to
Look
at me

Then, it comes back again, like a cold.

I wake up alone.


I
lock doors
and chain fences
and unplug telephone lines
and tend wounds
slow in healing because
I
am hurting myself for
loving you

trusting

never wanting
you to come back

I am carrying suitcases
filled with shoes
you gave me
For safekeeping
When you trusted me with the
Precious little of you
You had
To give

Shoes,
And blue
Towels
For my wet
And chilled
Mind
pelted by storms in
summer
here everyday since you left

But today is different.

I am getting into a car
Lifting
Black bags
Through windows
To hit roads
I no longer need to travel

Today
I replenish
Myself
With water
driving
Until I see sun
and if it comes back
I will be different


ready.

Ex man, next man (2006)

This is a case of the ex man messing it up for the next man
I don’t know how to say it any other way

You carry dreams
Like a guitar on your back
Black eyes sparkling with hope
Hoping to serenade and persuade
my heart
Until it dances like
A muse

This heart chooses not to dance.

You’re hoping you can set up residence
In a vacant room
In my mind
And occupy a space


But the space is filled.

You’re waiting on the bench
Hoping that
Someday
Even if it isn’t this inning
I’ll put you on

But that would be foul


You’re wishing with sparkling eyes
That we could
Find freedom
In a tight space, in a new face

But
This is a case of the ex man messing it up for the next man
I cannot give you what I do not have
And you can not provide me with what you cannot offer

If I met you on the street
When my heart was open
And full with songs, and space, and homeruns
Maybe the answer may be different
But I’ve seen lots like you
Before
Enchanted
To
Retreat
To maybe
When “Maybe” was a pseudonym for “No”

Right now
Maybe chills my skin
And the past brings sweat to my flesh
I’m smarting from a bitterness
That must run its course
And you don’t have to see me stare into the skies
His weight between our hugs


I can’t give my heart to anyone
Until I retrieve it from the man who stole it
Maybe gave willingly
Because I believed

His absence is larger then his presence ever was

Like new flowers
I appreciate your desire to entice me into spring
so lovely, that a woman would dance

But everything lovely
Has a season
Everything
Even you

A message to the poet who knows a broken heart

Keep trying
Keep moving
Keep pushing
Keep proving
Keep struggling
Keep fighting
Keep praying
Keep writing

The Elite Can Serve (Daily Cal, December 1999)

Past thoughts---

The issue of a community service requirement for UC and CSU graduation obviously hits a sore spot with many Daily Californian readers and writers. As a full time working student I can appreciate the unsettling stress of college life. For the average student struggling to balance academics, work, studying and activities, the added burden of yet another task to undertake seems overwhelming.

That said, I think it is important for us to remember as students in an elite university that all of us, regardless of background or work ethic, enjoy a privilege that many of the classmates who stood beside us at high school graduation did not; we have the opportunity to take advantage of educational opportunities that can challenge our thinking and broaden the possibility to shape our destinies.
An integral part of the educational experience is realizing there is more to education than the Puffy Combs/Adam Smith dogma of getting yours. Of course, education comes first. By no means am I devaluing the importance of paying rent, or making sure we have electricity to read books by, or food to eat even if it is only Ramen and sausages.

Let s be real: For most, our academic poverty is temporary. We are being groomed for upwardly mobile class ascension. Part of education begins when we step out the ivory tower and into the world. We are taught to be well trained, well read, well spoken. We are taught to think critically about social and political issues, matters of concrete and abstract intelligences.

How can we claim to be students prepared for the twenty-first century if we exclude social service from our academic reality as if it is a bad mixer added to a sophisticated drink? Community work allows me to think more critically about the application of my academic studies. It is a medium for personal and academic growth. There is even a not-so-altruistic motive for mandatory community service; if we don t work together to cultivate community, there may not be one for us to enter upon graduation.

Community service isn t about grudgingly giving up valuable time. It can be a professional learning experience. Any community service requirement should be fair and lenient; the Davis proposal should recognize the first priority of a student is education and survival.

That said, a few hours here and there over 4.5 years isn t really such a bad thing, is it? Even if you never do any other community service again in your life except for writing a big check at Christmas time, at the very least you can say, I took advantage of the opportunity to help others and myself.

Michelle Milam
UC Berkeley senior

three o'clock am (2006)

Somebody once told me
that one of these days
I was going to learn
----the world isn't a nice place
at three o'clock in the morning

But the world isn't
a nice place
period.
exclamation....

the world is
it is child
that never gives up the breast

the world is the blackjack benefactor
a house
that takes all

On good days
I gain inspiration
count it all joy
see it as service
as Congresswoman Chisholm said
the rent we pay for living on earth

other days
the world is
a green exit sign
that hangs above my door
causing me to ruminate
on troubled thoughts
gulping them down greedily
without pause

The dreamcatchers circa 1975-2006

For the generation that never marched....


learning white tipped wings
icy against green spring
cannot stand glass jars

thinking of rivers
we swam
like salmon

living on pennies
lost in small spaces

holding history
with our feet becuase
hands are tied

actin' polite
to the mannerless

fighting to eat together
yet dining alone

looking for the last
good gumball in the machine

wishing that the road
less traveled
were better lit

loving in red because
blue leaves us
bitter and white

caressing angry words
disguised by
smiling cursive

bringing home
treasures in brown
paper bags

living in pieces
of a love yet to be assembled

closing the door
on what was
when the scent remains

knowing that like relativity
all things
come back to motion

and the movement moves on....

The Changing of a Generation (2006)

The night before my maternal grandmother died, I went to church and prayed. It was late, and no one was in the sanctuary. An eerie violet light drifted through the stained glass and I immediately felt a warm presence.

My arms were so exhausted they were limp. It has been a difficult year, working to ensure that my grandmother was "taken care of" as my grandfather would say, and stayed comfortably in her own home. Our family fixed meals. We told jokes. We dressed and bathed lovingly. We smiled and laughed. After all, my grandmother was a woman with an indomitable spirit. She was the one who would tell off a patronizing teacher, and reprimand a prejudice sales person with a wit so biting that it had to be saluted with a blush. Yet she looked tired.

I think she knew that no matter what we would never give up. There are some people who give up on their sick relatives easily. Quality of life means more for the caregiver than the cared for. I don't know if we can ever repay our parents for what they have done.

On my knees that night I prayed for God to give us strength to make it through the next week and to bless the woman who had given up everything for us. I went to bed weeping.

Later, in the still of sleep, I felt a warm presence. It filled me from the inside out, removed my tears, and quieted my soul.

A few hours later, crying quietly, my mother called me and told me the news. She had passed away in her sleep. When we went to the house we saw her, in her bed, curled like a small bird that had fallen too early from its nest. She was the last living of eight brothers and sisters, and survived my grandfather who died several years earlier.

I knew, right then, that the guard had changed. The family moved, and a new generation had taken up the mantle of our history. I suddenly became aware that I was really an adult.

I felt the same way when I heard that Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King passed away. Except where I had the intimate memory of my grandmother, I feel detached from the memory of the movement.

We are the Denver that Toni Morrison writes of in Beloved. The Joshua generation. Born after something great has happened, and expected to complete what we did not begin.

I am the member of a generation who never heard the "I Have a Dream Speech" live. I participated in The March on Washington through the "Eyes on the Prize" series. I don't remember Huey Newton before his fall. The Vietnam War is a text in a history book. The Montgomery Boycott, the Birmingham bombings, are the subjects of objects--films, plays and books

Yet we are the generation that saw the aftermath of the cold war.
We watched the Berlin Wall fall. We watched the twin towers fall and prisons erected. Phones now travel, computers fit in our pockets and information superhighways laid. We saw televised police beatings.
Few of us ever owned a record.
We witnessed a continent stricken by a disease for which there is no cure.
We were the witnesses to the failed war on poverty, the rise of the new war on drugs, and the absolute war on terror.
We are a generation of an expanding middle class, and declining public participation.
We are the hip-hop generation. The generation of making the old seem new, and the new seem old.
We are a generation that has fought a civil war, with all the irony in that term, in our own cities.
We are the generation that likely will never live the American Dream of 2.5 kids and a dog. A generation living in the shadow of the great cause that is our past, looming over us, reminding us of how far we have traveled.
We are the generation that made color blindness popular, and race politics polemic-- and yet we still have not answered the challenge for which we are called.

Absent the benefit of retrospect, our hope is bittersweet. Many of us have been told mistakenly that we have arrived; the thought is as sobering as a brick.

If this is the promised land, what hope is there for change?

If our student activists seem overzealous today, it is only because sometime I think we are trying to recreate a past that is their legacy.

But Coretta, the keeper of the legacy, of a dream that we as a generation know nothing about, but understand the desire, is our grandmother. With her passing I believe that once again the guard has changed.

A new generation is being called to come forward and lead.

I know much about my grandmother’s sacrifices. There are many secrets I will never know. One thing is sure. I know that she loved me. I know that she would want me to take what she offered and pass it on.

Maybe this is the hope of a nation.

Healing (A Song, 2006)

He’s A Healer

Lead:
Oh Lord I need your loving arms today
I trust in you that I may find my way
The road is rough and I am fading fast
Open a way so I may pass

Chorus:
And when the way seems unclear
I know in time you’ll heal


Lead:
You said trust in you and you’ll direct my path
You said to receive I need only ask
I fall on my knees and I start to pray
I feel your spirit move, and know you’re not far away

Chorus:
And when the way seems unclear
I know in time you’ll heal

He’s a healer
(Healer)
Healer
(Healer!)
A Heal-e-e-e-e-e-ler! (all)

He’s a healer
(Healer)
Healer
(Healer!)
A Heal-e-e-e-e-e-ler! (all)


Lead:
You’re a healer!
A provider!
My Jehovah-Jireh!
You’re my savior
A way maker
And your labor
Gives me favor

Chorus:
And when the way seems unclear
I know that in time you’ll heal

Promised Land Lost? (2005)

An editorial I wrote last year...

Tough love isn’t a bad thing. Tough without the love isn’t too good.

Bill Cosby’s last year Bill Cosby’s speech at Charles Drew Elementary School in Bayview Hunter’s Point could easily be summed up as, “Promised Land Lost.”

Perhaps less poetic than Milton, Cosby came under fire for his harsh analysis of poor Blacks in a controversial speech marking Brown vs. the Board of Education decision last May.

The San Francisco Chronicle printed Cosby’s comments blasting negligent Black parents who mourn troubled youngsters. “Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn’t know he had a pistol?,” Cosby asked, “And where is the father? You can’t keep saying that God will find a way. God is tired of you.”

There is a nugget of truth in Cosby’s argument. The future of Black America doesn’t rest in the hands of public institutions. Racism exists, yet we as a people cannot allow racism to prevent us from being who God created us to be. Unjust standard, but what’s the alternative?

Here’s another truth: Most Black people aren’t on drugs, derelict, destitute, in jail, or swiftly heading there---and those people resent the idea that victimization is second nature to Blacks. Cosby’s remarks struck gold with blue collars and buppies within the community resentful of an “underclass” that hasn’t arrived at the foot of the mountain, let alone the top; it also and endeared him to conservatives happier than hallelujah to cosign.

However well intentioned Cosby’s desire for parental responsibility, his indignant response can be likened to Moses in the Old Testament striking water from a rock and telling the unfaithful Israelites, “Hear now, you rebels; shall we bring forth water for you out of this rock?” This was the ultimate insult to God because Moses didn’t believe in the divine transformation. And he paid a hefty price—Moses, the man who spent the majority of his life devoted to God’s work was denied entrance to the promised land because didn’t acknowledge that it was bigger than himself.

A good friend taught me that responsibility means that what we do makes a difference. If accountability applies only to the poor, we’ve created a difference without distinction.

The sense of a common struggle is eroding among some in the Black middle class. We cannot drive our SUV’s to corporate jobs and go to our and step over the homeless on our way to our mega churches without remembering, “To whom much is given, much is required.” It defies the legacy of our grandparents who shared all they had, even when that was little.

Progressives may disagree with their politics, but haven’t conservatives (and Black nationalists) argued for years that the Black community needs people willing to do more than write a check? Cosby is among a privileged few with the ability to command diverse unilateral and national attention. The question begs to be asked--Wouldn’t it be powerful if we used our resources to transform our families instead of shaming them?