Hope bubbles up from underneath,
a primal origin originating in
a barren womb, pushing
against my solar plexus,
seat of the soul,
and the urge
to run
lifts
me up
toward a free floating expression
of liberty through this tiny city
with a thousand thousand
foreign eyes, every sign
a teletype narrative
for the Indian,
the Muslim,
the African,
the Chinese,
the Mexican,
a
smug
farewell
to the White man
from the Jews in the statehouse,
and I have the urge to hide
my hair, flowing river
of the beautiful
White woman,
corona
of
fertility,
emblem of
ancient slavery,
women with shapes like mine,
skin like mine, eyes like mine,
chained to the wall by
black and brown
savages,
men
whose
descendants run wild over Europe, Australia,
the British Isles, Canada, the United States,
an infection in the veins of the world,
borne on the shoulders of every
White man, woman, and child
whose ancestors were
conquerors,
builders,
visionaries,
plowed down
into the very soil
like bones and flesh and
failing memory by parasites
who have never fed their children
by the labor of their own hands,
and
yet I run
for sheer joy,
buoyed up by what I know:
that if God is truth, I walk with God,
real truth, only truth, outside the Bible,
outside the Evangelicals and the Catholics
and the Methodists and the Lutherans,
the truth that so long as one
human on earth knows
the truth, speaks
the truth, lives
in the light
of
truth,
there is hope.
May 23, 2024
