Now I cannot not see
the blight everywhere
maureen mclane
Now I cannot not see
the blight everywhere
maureen mclane
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
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
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 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