Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience – Amy Young

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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Planetology

by Amy Young

Nothing is as it seems

    and everything is as it seems.

Without truth this is true.

    The song sparrow who

this morning trills

as usual and the horizon

    which has gone

in a matter of minutes

    from pink to gray—

these truths are solid.

But yesterday we were a free

    country. Or maybe it was the day

before that. And that seemed

    true too. Though the sky is

always redder in hue

looking back. Rose-colored

    glasses and all that.

My ancestors are groaning

    in their graves. They used

a compass rose to arrive

at this shore. So, we can’t really

    be sure of anything anymore—

can we? Even the sparrow

    singing full throttle

atop the crepe myrtle

seems at best a shaky

    proposition. At the very least

a grey dawn will sully the sky

    as we rise again. They say the sun

isn’t due to burn out, yet.