Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience – Edward D. Currelley

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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I AMERICA

by Edward D. Currelley

America is my home

 This, is where I’m from

Generations past my ancestors

Were stolen from their home land

 Brought here in chains

Generations since

 We’ve worked hard to be Americans

This, without choice

 Because, for the most part, it’s all we know

We’ve been given reluctant invitation of assimilation

 Un-equal justice, after the fact

We are made to feel like occupying refugees

This state of reality wasn’t asked for

It was forced upon us

We remain the only race of people in these United States

 Not given the choice of coming to these shores of our own volition

There has never been an open armed welcome

 Benefits or opportunity un-earned

Give us your weak, poor etc, never applied

Though we’ve managed advancement, assimilation

 We as a people continue to struggle

 Within the structure of a nation in denial

 A nation of false promise, blinded by its own dark truths

A nation in fear of its own reflection

A nation unwilling to correct its misdeeds

Of challenging the truths of its origin

These are our American realities

James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed,

But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”