Author Toni Cade Bambara said,
“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”
and of course I have read
about revolution
and the tea party
and the American civil war
and all the ways we have learned
to spill and split
and yet
As a lifelong writer
imaginer artist and dreamer
I wonder if revolution is also
combing our fingers
through the soil
and planting spring seeds in its belly
trusting the sun
and the water
to help life burst forward
or maybe revolution is a song
we sing together
on the bridge of late summer
when the sun is hot and we all got
beads of sweat rolling
down our faces, enough
shine on our foreheads
to look like a whole other
moon but it won’t stop
us from dancing we
work in rhythm here
how we keep this thing
humming, you know blades
swung high, then low,
then high, then low,
and we all know
not to get in the way
of anybody’s harvest
and maybe revolution is
loving each other’s stories
enough to hold them tenderly
and give them a place to live
and be shared in abundance
and maybe it is a love for the
land and the water and the air and the children
yes especially the children
and maybe it is us
speaking our truths and
listening to each other
as if we are also precious,
also sacred
I come from a long line of mighty women.
Women who remember. Women who tell.
Women who put their hands in the mud,
divining truth and sweeping shadows.
I come from people with hard hands and soft hearts
I come from women with scrubbed hands
who always try to do the right thing.
We all come from something bigger,
some root that reminds us we were alive
before our memory began to frame the story.
Author John Edgar Wideman said,
“Do not fall asleep in your enemy’s dream”
and I wonder
whose dream is this
we are living inside of now
whose dream decided
the shape of power and all it exacts
who imagined this room
the chair you are sitting in
the walls and their color
the clothes we chose to show up in
our hands and what we decide
to do with them
I mean
I read poems at a prison
not so long ago
and noticed it had been built
before Colorado was even a state
meaning someone
arrived for their first time
at the great red canyons
and open plains
the skies that take your breath away
where I might imagine
the wildflowers blooming in spring
or a herd of bison working their way through the grasses
and they instead imagined
barbed wire
double barbed wire
working its way over the tops
of stone walls
and overlooking from the top of the plateau
a tower with an armed guard
I’m saying
imagination is everything
everything began with a thought
including you, yes
you and your lovely way of noticing
and if thought is creative, then we, here, are creators.
The first storytellers were women.
Scratching out dreams on stones.
We know how to make things.
Look at our hands and how quickly
they can build a callus.
Look what we can build.
When we are bold enough to dive
our hands into the earth,
look what we can make of mud
and wood and stone.
What we make
when we come together.
If imagination is a handful of seeds,
imagine what we will build
when we accept what we can grow.
In the future
maybe we are avatars
maybe we are post reality
cooling in the confines of worlds
constructed for us
forgetting to find the answers to questions we haven’t considered asking
forgetting to wonder how our imaginations have been narrowed
how will we know
whose instruments we have become?
I imagine what we can make possible together
when we are intentional
especially when we are the ones
who build the road
the life we can open
as juicy as ever
where everyone is loved and cared for
and all have enough to eat, beautiful and safe shelter, clean air and water.
In the future I imagine we build, we share generously,
knowing there is always more than enough for everyone.
We are kind and creative, we live in harmony with each other
and our environment. We are healthy, well educated, and joyful, and we live in peace.
The road to the future is not always clear.
I mean, I’m a poet and have, since I was a young teen,
told people this is who I would be when I grew up
and yes, sometimes those people even laughed in my face
while they spat words like “impossible” at me
vowing that their pitiful dream for my life was “inevitable”
and yes, I forgive them, the fragility of their hope
but I know
the author Mariame Kaba says,
“Hope is a discipline.”
and so:
We keep going.
After all, what else is there to do?
What other way but onward?