Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience – Lynne Eve Grossman

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


***


I am a Palette
By Lynne Eve Grossman

Sometimes, I paint my coagulated
Life glue into
shy-knee lack-her

blobbing recycled
soul fragments

frenetic collages of release
splattering that canvas of my mind and
heart

blasts of energy
a vibrant, nonverbal voice
S T R E T C H I N G beyond the copper moon
in search of solution less answers

vibrations of my soul
creating musical vision
with no orch-castration

later, out of my studio
I often ponder

How many brushstrokes?

How many globs of paint?

How many assemblages?

pushed into those mocking
paint-mouthed canvas lips?

how many colors to Mute
burnt orange blood
of yesterdays?

How many swirls to
cement
those gangrene shadows?

I AM a palette
electric Freedom
rushing through me
with Each stroke of paint
breathing and surging
with passion-ART power

that Sir-cut won’t break me
creative jolts
jumpstart energetic re-lease

I DRAW lines UN-bounded
I PAINT shapes Un-censored

I AM a palette
Re-creating Life’s rainbows with
Multi-Colored Hope.

2 comments:

  1. Yes, truth/reality comes with creativity. Powerful poem Lynne!

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  2. Freedom to the palette, though books may be burned, the palette will not be cen-sir-ed.
    Love it, Lynne. Lofty at the start, working up to those last three verses which really got with it.
    ..

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