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