Sunday, January 29, 2017

Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience – Michael Kiesow Moore



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, explicitly condones or implies a call for violence, 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


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What I Have Learned So Far
By Michael Kiesow Moore

The world is a broken heart.
We have a choice:
steel our hearts

raise the fortress doors
keep all pain out
   or—

Stand inside all the brokenness
let our hearts break again and again
open to all the sorrow

call it in



Previously published in What to Pray For (Nodin Press), 2015.

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