Don’t believe them when they tell you that people like us will never write poetry
When they compare us to a virus
Or a cancer
Eating the guts out of a society
That was never so far gone as when it finally found the words to name us.
I know a person whose written words
Have reached into my chest and broken it
Like a stiff spring breeze
Breaking along the ground, waking up seeds
And only someone without a soul to speak of
Would try to tell me that those words were not poetry
I know a woman whose every movement is a meditation
On grace personified
Every unguarded flick of her fingers a breaking free of fear
A poem with a thousand meanings
Giving voice to the ghosts of a century
Whose own hands were shocked into silence
Unruly bodies forced to compliance
Don’t believe them, when they tell you we will never write poetry
What borrowed words, in a colonizer’s tongue,
Consonants cracking like branches in winter
Like light you never quite feel on your skin,
Will ever rival the immediacy of their hands in motion?
Their pen on the page. Their voice in the crowd.
I once knew a man who ran words in his mouth like candy
Just to know the joy of sound.
For whom fricatives were a favourite flavour.
For whom words only came in torrents or silences
Whose silences held poetry
Aching with more palpable feeling than any song on the radio
Played into meaninglessness.
I know people who bend language around them
Who invent whole new taxonomies of meaning
Just so they can tell each other exactly which shades of purple their lovers taste of
For whom song is as natural as breathing
For whom silence grants space to be free
Do not tell me they will never know poetry
They are who taught poetry to me.
This Is Not An Image Of Loss 