From the Festival - The Way the World Begins Again

This year at the Split this Rock Poetry Festival, on a beautiful, wet Saturday morning, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Roxanne Wallace facilitated an intergenerational workshop on love, safety and community inspired by June Jordan’s children’s book Kimako’s Story.   

 

This poetry workshop was based on the successful initiation of the June Jordan Saturday Survival School in Durham, North Carolina, where whole families used concepts from June Jordan’s unpublished essays, “Towards a Survival Literature for Afrikan Children” (first presented in Washington DC in 1976) and “The Creative Spirit and Children’s Literature.” The workshop activities included collaborative marker mural-making based on quotations from Jordan’s essays, fill-in-the-blank poem-making based on June Jordan’s Kimako’s Story, and the creation of a group new age “Who Look at Me” based on June Jordan’s first children’s book. 

At the end of the workshop, the participants created 7 group poems designed to keep us inspired, connected and present.  Check out a sampling of these poems below.

 

Poem for the Future

Do not use the words child, children, little, or kids.

Come bright love sing us forward

to safety and wholeness

family and home outside our doors

butterflies from before and after

fluttering inside outside our dreams

our play

welcome here

forever

our smiles welcome here forever

our souls sovereign

our souls free

 - Julia Roxanne Wallace and Ruth Forman

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Poem for Getting it Done

Include the word “share”

Get schooled

Wake up to love deeply

And return to love

Share stories

And hydrate

Have babies, wake up, have babies, wake up

Live near grandma, pay mamma back

Share 29 years

And a thousand fifty five before

Into a book a play a song

Read poetry in mothertongue

Write poetry in mothertongue

Plant a whole garden

Bicycle

Wheelchair

Rollerskate

Skateboard

Love

After you get it done

share.

  - Lauren Muller and Yasi 

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A Poem for Moving Your Body

Repeat the word “Black”

Black goes with everything

Black bicycle, biceps

Blue black before orange

this black

this body moving into black

running through the night

and my back and your block

and bimbimbop

push back push up

push through so black

body absorbs all colors

becoming black

throat tongue larynx

bellybutton groin toes

truth new black old

black soft black silky

shiny shifting find

the rhythm black

cartwheel on the black top

yes body yes black

 - Becky Thompson, Kathy Engel,  J. M. Schmidt