AND THEN THERE CAME A DAYBREAK

To my departed sister, Rachel

To Amilcar Cabral who taught us how to abolish the distance with our Dead

To Thich Nhat Hanh who inspired both Martin Luther King and Yuri Kochiyama
and taught us why there is no birth, no death

for days on end
it doesn’t rain
there is a drought
i don’t find the words
to say to myself
that you are dead

for days on end
tears won’t come
but my skin burns
and cracks
and cries out

at other blessed times
a breakthrough
when i realize
your voice
will not be stilled
just because
you are silent
now

in France
where you died
there is a saying
that sorrow can be drowned
but the waters of Time
will not close
over my memory of you
like a stone sinks
after its ricochet dance

and then
after an endless night
there came a daybreak
when looking at
your photographed gaze
i knew you were holding hands
with the Ancestors
your head held proudly
above water
your body, unshackled
from pain,
delivered at last
from oppression’s quicksands –
but never forgetting
to keep
a fierce and tender vigil
over those
you left behind

THERE COMES A TIME WHEN TIME APPROACHES

“Time is long”
The last words I heard W.E.B. Dubois say
in Accra on Black Star Square

those who stole our land
from us
try to steal our time too

there is no such thing
as Black and Indigenous longevity –
and death by incarceration
tortuously
confiscates
our right to live

but
there comes a time
when, escaping the would-be time-robbers,
Time approaches
and all we have to do
is beckon
and walk in step

it is not a sea change
nor an epiphany
no
rather the poetic justice
of our endless Love

there comes a time
when Time is so translucent
so shadowless
that i can see
glimpses
behind corners
i have not walked around
and
the cusp of tomorrow
written in visible ink

there comes a time
when Time is read
like a book opened at the right page
by the untethered wind
of our ancestral will to win

there comes a time
when Time approaches
on tip toes
gently tamed
back
where it belongs
into our calloused hands

WHERE DO UNSHED TEARS GO?

where do the tears
we don’t shed
go?

what do we do
with their inward
flow?

our inner child
was told to be brave
and for not one tear
to leave the eye

as fighters we know
not to show
the tear-makers
how full of pain
we are

as oppressed folk
we read
that only bankers’ daughters
have the luxury
to cry

but then
where does all
that water of life
go?

they say
a baby dying of malnutrition
cannot afford to cry
because
it needs its tears
as a last desperate hydration
not to die

we who likewise
are dying of lack of freedom
how can we hold back
the torrents of our lament
but still get a warrior’s rest
in the underground
of our tears unspent?

Fighting Words

Journal of the Communist Workers league

AND THEN THERE CAME A DAYBREAK | THERE COMES A TIME WHEN TIME APPROACHES | WHERE DO UNSHED TEARS GO?

Poems by renowned Black leader and activist Julia Wright