Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience - Bruce Robinson

Close up image of a microphone on a stage. The audience that is facing the microphone is blurred, appearing as a myriad of colors (red, white, green, yellow, etc.)
As the incoming administration builds its agenda of attack on marginalized people, on freedom of speech, on the earth itself, poetry will continue to be an essential voice of resistance. Poets will speak out in solidarity, united against hatred, systemic oppression, and violence and for justice, beauty, and community.

In this spirit, Split This Rock is offering its blog as a Virtual Open Mic. For the rest of this frightening month, January of 2017, we invite you to send us poems of resistance, power, and resilience.

We will post every poem we receive unless it is offensive (containing language that is derogatory toward marginalized groups, that belittles, uses hurtful stereotypes, etc.). After the Virtual Open Mic closes, we hope to print out and mail all of the poems to the White House.


For guidelines on how to submit poems for this call, visit the Call for Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience blog post

***

Believe Me
by Bruce Robinson

I’m writing this poem and
it’s a tremendous success,
very very successful, as you
can see.  It even says so,

right there in the poem,
I know this for a fact. And
in fact, I heard it from
an extremely credible source,

absolutely, I guarantee you,
in fact, it’s really rather amazing
that, well, I hate to tell you,
but this is going to be a big,

big incredible event.  I’m going to
write a great, great work and
I’m going to make editors
pay dearly for that work.  Mark my words.  

  from Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, December 2016


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