In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand, The next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful brown people have gathered. The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window The dead stares on the faces of nameless children…īefore I start this poem we could be silent forever This is a poem for interrupting this program.Īnd still you want a moment of silence for the dead? The 110 stories that that cnn, bbc, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored. The 110 stories that history uprooted from its textbooks This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told, This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground amidst the ashes of amnesia. This is a September 14th 1992 poem for the people of Somalia. This is a September 13th 1971 poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York. This is a September 12th 1977 poem for Steven Biko in South Africa. This is a September 11th 1973 poem for Chile. This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written. You mourn now as if the world will never be the sameĪnd the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be.
You open your mouths to invoke a moment of our silence Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness…įrom somewhere within the pillars of power In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears
There will be no dna testing or dental records to identify their remains.ġ00 years of silence… for the hundreds of millions of indigenous people In the south… the north… the east… the west… None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.Ĥ5 seconds of silence… for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas…ġ,933 miles of silence… for every desperate bodyĭrowned in swollen rivers at the pearly gates to the Empire’s underbelly,Ī gaping wound sutured shut by razor wire and corrugated steel.Ģ5 years of silence… for the millions of Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky.įor those who were strung and swung from the heights of sycamore trees Two months of silence… for the decades of dead in Colombia, whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have piled up and slipped off our tongues.įive days of silence… for the Guatemaltecos Nine months of silence… for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin, and the survivors went on as if alive.Ī year of silence… for the millions of dead in Viet Nam-a people, not a war-for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives bones buried in it, their babies born of it. embargo against the country.īefore I begin this poem, two months of silence… for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa, where “homeland security” made them aliens in their own country Six months of silence… for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result
Moment of silence full#
A full day of silence… for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces over decades of occupation.
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