Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience – Lori Desrosiers

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


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Elephant of Mortality
by Lori Desrosiers

I hear another military jet whining overhead and the only elephant in the room is the wooden one  on the  coffee table.  or it could  be when I check on my mother every night, or listen for the next shoe to drop, or the clock in its blatant forward motion, our mortality humming like feedback from a speaker marking the moment, which is all there is, so I watch the gray cat pull and push her breath, listen to my husband snoring as I type each night, when insomnia begs me to hold onto the  last possible second  of today,  in case of a hiccup in the continuum, in case for  someone I love,  tomorrow never  comes.

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