Author: dmf

more like an organ than protection

The coarse croker-sack cloth                                         

she’d grown to clutch                                         

mesh-merged with her                                         

woof and pang                      

rose to serve                                         

more like organ                                         

than protection 

-lobe by atsuro riley

since before the military came

                                                                             since before the military came

                                                                      and bulldozed our old sod houses our entire village

                                               so they could make a runway and yes we are still angry about that

                                                                  and we are still wanting reparations for what they did

                                                                               they finally did take that hangar down and it

looks better without that big old thing on there

and I know we are still looking for

                       what was lost in the nuna on that day

                                                                                        what they did was wrong

and we are still here

                       and even though the military still today has that huge other hangar

                                                                                                      on the other side with that

                                                                                                                             military man

                                                                                                   who lives in there that we have

                                                                                                                                      never met

                                                               and the other that relieves him every three weeks or so  

we were here before

they put those big humongous radar ears up       

and then took them down   

and yes they left many barrels and still never got all of them

we all want all their residue

               to be

    off our island forever

                                                     we were here before

                              the government started drawing arbitrary lines

                                        encasing us into this wildlife refuge

                                      without our full knowledge or consent

rest of we acknowledge ourselves by Allison Akootchook Warden

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/158110/we-acknowledge-ourselves

a world  where none is lonely, none hunted, alien

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful 
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,   
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,   
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,   
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more   
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:   
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro   
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world   
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,   
this man, superb in love and logic, this man   
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,   
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, 
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives   
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

robert hayden’s frederick douglass

Why is this Age Worse…?

Why is this age worse than earlier ages?
In a stupor of grief and dread
have we not fingered the foulest wounds
and left them unhealed by our hands?

In the west the falling light still glows,
and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun,
but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses,
and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.

-Akhmatova