Call for Poems that Speak Against Violence and for Embrace

If the back & arms you carry riddle with black

spots & marks made by birds who don’t want us here—

I will remind you: There are people who did this before us,

brown & black-spotted, yellow, with rattails,

born from what others did not want & loathed & aimed

to never let belong, & so, we are here today—

the field is wide. We make saliva from root & light.

Our spikelets grow, & do you feel the wind?

       - Joe Jiménez, Smutgrass

Orlando. Dhaka. Istanbul. Baghdad. Medina. Nice. The killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and the murder of police officers in Dallas. This summer, terrible bigotry and violence have rent our global community. The killings must end, and we in the poetry community must contribute in any way we can. As we search for answers to these horrors and for ways to combat hatred and prejudice, we are reminded of poetry’s capacity to respond to violence, to help us regenerate, like spikelets sprouting in a contested field, claiming our public spaces for everyone.

In solidarity with all those targeted at home and abroad, from the LGBT community in the United States to devastated families of Baghdad, Split This Rock is offering its blog as a Virtual Open Mic. Over the next couple of weeks, from July 14 to 28, we are requesting poems in response to and against violence toward marginalized communities:

• Poems will be accepted until July 28, 2016. 
• Send us your poems in response to this violent summer, and we will publish them on Split This Rock’s blog, Blog This Rock (blogthisrock.blogspot.com), to create a Virtual Open Mic. We welcome poems new and old, whether previously published or not. (Please include credit information for previously published work.) 
• Thematically we are wide open: resistance, mourning, rage, celebration, love. We are especially open to poems focused on how we build again, how we heal, the places of light shining through the pain. 
• Unfortunately, Split This Rock's blog is not compatible with poems with complex formatting. Should we find that your poem can not be properly we will be in touch to request a different poem.
• Send the poem(s) as email attachments (.doc or .docx only) with the subject line “A Call in Response to Violence” to info@splitthisrock.org. Include the poem name and your name in the document title.
• Please include the poem's title and your full contact information in the body of the email. 
• We invite one poem per person. 
• From the open mic collection, we may occasionally choose poems to run as Poem of the Week in the weeks ahead. We will contact you directly if we decide to use your poem for Poem of the Week. 

After the Virtual Open Mic closes, we hope to print out and mail all of the poems to Congress and the National Rifle Association.

Split This Rock is also accepting poems for its 10th Annual Poetry Contest until November 1, 2016. For submissions guidelines, visit Split This Rock's website or Submittable.

A Poem for Senator Kennedy

The Man Who Should Be President
August 28, 2009

In memoriam: Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Feb. 22, 1932 – Aug. 25, 2009

"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on,
the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die."
--- speech conceding the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination.


Ted, headlines read of your passing,
Camelot Ends, Again;
Liberal Lion Dies;
A Torch Extinguished –
But we refuse to believe it.
You taught us better than that.
“I speak out of a deep sense of urgency
about the anguish and anxiety I have seen across America.”
The death of our Liberal Lion
Must not nullify his roar.
“The cause endures” in a jungle
Of disease, poverty, unemployment,
And every child left behind.
In a cacophony of conservative voices
You sang of Jefferson and Jackson,
Committed to jobs and health care
While opponents labeled you liberal,
Your laws and causes, Socialism.
But you knew better than that.
Which 300+ bills
You authored and enacted
Into law were written in the reddest ink?:
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,
National Cancer Act of 1971,
Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986,
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990,
Ryan White AIDS Care Act in 1990,
Civil Rights Act of 1991,
Mental Health Parity Act in 1996 and 2008,
State Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997,
No Child Left Behind Act in 2002,
the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act in 2009,
Or was it several unsuccessful efforts at immigration reform?
Or Universal Health Care you championed since 1970?
In Camelot you would be King,
In America, the man who should be President.
Contemporary Ben Franklin,
Master Orator, Elder Statesman,
Super Diplomat, The Man
Who got the deed done,
White hopes shrouded
By the black cloak draping
Your desk, formerly your brother’s,
white roses in a black vase – a song of yourself,
The great “I” not individual
But communal, community, America.
Your 46 years in the chamber
Outlasted single- and two-term occupants
Of the Oval Office, 9 to be exact –
there would be no rest
For a Senator whose cigarette box
Engraving read, “The first shall be last.”
Good Catholic, Moses of the United States,
Your Old Testament values
Never shrugged due to New Testament politics,
And none of us have yet seen
The Liberal Land of milk and honey.
Though your body be dead
Your legacy is not.
Out of that deep sense of urgency
The cause must endure.
The sick must not get sicker,
The hungry not get hungrier
While the rich continue getting richer.
You vowed yourself to Whitman’s America,
Gave us a song and a dance and a dream.
Had you been President
America would be coughing less
And missing less time at work.
May every Patriotic American,
With Faith rooted in the Bill of Rights,
Get a tattoo of you on their Left arm,
The one they use in the voting booth,
Hoping to keep the American Dream alive
And showing that “the dream shall never die."

Joe Gouveia writes the monthly poetry column Meter Man for the Barnstable Patriot where this poem first appeared.