THEIR HOLLOW HOUSE

Palestinian youth throws stones at Israeli troops.

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For Ralph Poynter

“ Love is contraband in Hell
Cause love is an acid
That eats away bars”

Assata Shakur 1987

the candles
lit last night
have survived the dawn
and are
still burning

Revolutionary Love
born on the plantation
handed down
by Assata
is always rekindled

the bars she writes about
are the bars of fear

our ancestral victories
lost in white supremacy translation
offer us the secret
of survival

we have passed on the code

like termites
we are eating the Capitalist house
from the inside
and
we have already won

AND SO, YES, THEY CAN THROW STONES

For little Jana, the Palestinian British child who said on October 13, 2023:

“There’s a lot of bombing and we have to worry about the house shaking. If it shakes, it feels like it is slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly falling.”

and so, yes,
they can throw stones,
because they hope
the stones will fly
high
over the moon
and land
on the other side of the Apartheid
that stone-walled
their childhood

and so, yes,
they can throw
fistfuls of unmelted grief –
the moonstones
that their unshed tears
feel like

and so, yes
the bulldozers
bull whip
those who dare to survive
burying them alive

and so, yes,
USA armored cranes
are not used
to lift the stones and
save
those whose cries
can still be heard
but to exhume
and mutilate
martyred bodies
in the sanctity
of Gaza cemeteries

and so, yes,
their loved ones can throw stones
as many memorial stones
as were not erected
for the unfound –
now spirits roaming what is left
of the land

and, yes,
those who survive
are allowed as many stones
as milestones
will soon be needed
for the way back
to their homes

and they know
they will retrieve
even more stones than they threw
to rebuild the houses
that keep
slowly
slowly
slowly
slowly
falling

The U.S. Ambassador at the UN puts up the wrong hand at the Security Council vote yesterday and has to be prompted by a white colleague sitting behind her

BLACKFACE LADY MACBETH

even though she is not wringing
her blood stained hands,
a troubled Blackface Lady Macbeth
puts up the wrong hand
slouched at her Security Council desk
during the ceasefire vote
for Gaza

Israel
would be nothing
without those
who sit behind her
and pull her strings
back into place

is her minstrel karma
taking over –
or has she perceived
that the table she cannot
sit up straight at
has become
History’s dock ?

there are many like her
who keep the Blackface cogs
of neo liberalism moving –
the Judge who sent Mumia
back to death by incarceration
and
the Judge at the Supreme Court
who arrogantly
follows and swallows
our money

the cracks in the Blackface masks
are beginning to show

Fighting Words

Journal of the Communist Workers league

THEIR HOLLOW HOUSE | AND SO, YES, THEY CAN THROW STONES | BLACKFACE LADY MACBETH |

Poems by renowned Black leader and activist Julia Wright