The Earth is a Socialist by Shavahn Best
The Earth is a Socialist
Mother is just
She would never imprison a living thing
Behind walls of bars like rodents or reptiles
To be gawked at
Like Ota Benga a Mbuti from the Congo who in 1906
at 23 was put on display with an orangutan
at the Bronx zoo
Who after ten years of
entertaining the savage hearts of his wild-eyed captors
toting wide-eyed children for the lesson
in white man supremacy and
never seeing his homeland again
took his own life at 33
She would never kill by lethal injection one hundred years later
to cover up centuries of dehumanization of rape lynching tarring scarring
Bloody passage to incarceration
from Goree Island’s Door of No Return
to the ‘Weeping Time’ in Savannah 1859
436 enslaved African men women and children sold to settle a debt
auctioned by gavel until the last rain drop fell
to Jackson Georgia
Troy Anthony Davis
IV line plunged lethal lies into the intricate perfect heart of truth chambers
to snuff out the exquisite reincarnation of that which
she holds most dear
Necessary Brother Teacher Son Loving Father to seven generations Imagining Rejoicing in lessons learned her way for
She has a job for every one
No matter if you’re as small as the littlest sucker fish on the largest Blue Whale
No matter what shade or hue some one else’s eyes see you as
Yes indeed 100% employment but
she will never have you working a so-called job blowing families up into
unrecognizable bits of mangled plasma and bones
Never scores of millions in disease-ridden refugee camps
Heavy with the silence of a grandmother’s gaze because her grandbaby
Never tells stories again his sweet child’s voice
his mama and papa were shelled out of his body
by the kidnapped child soldier with PTSD
There is no bridge between unconscionable war and the natural world
This madness is not of her doing
She does not rain napalm nor white phosphorus
She does not burn the black gold she’s buried for millions of years
The sun she knows is hot enough already and
it is time we embrace the concept of community
She has given us at least five senses to know better
the capacity to remember
She has kindly left it to evolution to smooth out all the rough spots
For instance there is no me
There is a daughter of a sister of a brother of a father of a mother and
my brown-eyed daughter Diyala laughing in brown skin
under tight brown curls is calling me
Mom! Make Wyoming stop!
Blue-eyed big sister beneath straight blond hair with
Fair fingers continues the tickling
Both my girls’ freckled faces take turns being on top as
their tangled roll of long limbs changes direction and
I would not trade one varicose vein
Not one worry wrinkle dividing time into half-lives yet again
I put my ear to the ground with my girls who stop to catch their breath
To listen
We hear Madiba’s gentle footsteps on her path
Dancing on the hillsides of Qunu South Africa
He leaves large prints to fill
For Nelson Mandela