BIBI IN BUNDY STYLE

placing his arm
in a cast
the better
to weaponize his victimhood,
author of a memo
on the psychology of victims
calling in on suicide helplines,
presenting himself
to the very end
as a victim of pornography
to get a stay of execution,
Ted Bundy
is a textbook model
for Israel’s claim to self defense
with a holo-casted arm to enable
its mass serial killing

yes but
in the end
during his last killing spree
even Bundy
got disorganized
leaving clues in his car
for all to see
just as the IDF
is letting the narratives
that will destroy it
go viral

when given
by a detective
an assessment
of the number of his victims,
Bundy said :
“Add a digit to that “.

How many thousands of digits
are we waiting
to see
added
in
Palestine?

PLEASE CUT YOUR CAMERA

to all the children in Palestine – who are trying to find the words to say it

addressing a young child
hunched over
his ancestral land,
a journalist asks
what are you doing –
“i am digging a grave”

to the same child,
why are you doing it –
the smiling reply is :
“the head is here
and
this rock is the feet”

and his tiny body
speaks for him
as he measures
the hole he made
with his small limbs
and bomb-broken stones
and he is bereaved
and
relieved
of the unspeakable anguish
that can only be borne
if it all becomes
a silent game –
a land mime

to another child,
how was your father martyred –
no reply

to the same child,
with gentle insistence,
tell me how your father was martyred –
a beat
and then a whisper :
“please cut your camera”

THE BONES BENEATH

For the youth descending from the survivors of the 1919 Race Massacre in Elaine, Arkansas – who collected the memorial soil at the site where great uncle Silas Hoskins was lynched

For Dr Mary Olson who loyally and lovingly mentors the youth

For Lenora Marshall, co-founder of the Elaine Legacy Center, the surviving descendant of the Massacre who still remembers the names of stolen trees

For James White and Vera thanking them for their courage and resistance

For William Quiney III, the founding president of the Elaine Legacy Center, who passes on the history rootically

For Pastor-Judge Wendell Griffen who upholds the civil and human rights of the descendants of the Massacre

For the children in Palestine who this time of year are harvesting at their own peril the few olive trees left under the bombs

For my own children

on August sixth
nineteen forty five
the USA Enola Gay
dropped a giant mushrooming atomic tree
over Hiroshima
and it’s burning canopy
unleashed a wind that wiped out all life
and turned the living
into skinless hollow eyed Hibakusha
for whom after the screams
the rest became silence –
a soundlessness living on today
at point zero
and the stillness is still so utter
that it becomes
the absent leaves
unable to flutter
of a sapling
who though maimed refused to die –
the Phoenix Tree
we museum visitors gaze at
over a low fence
fossilized in its perennial resistance,
the Phoenix Tree
who tells us we can be
wounded
felled
stricken
but remain still standing propped up
by wooden sticks – our memory walker
with hope uncharred

imagine
if trees not only used
their rootical underground railroad
to communicate nutrients
between themselves
but
to connect
and
transmit shared testimonies
of liberation struggle
to the seedlings
we all are

imagine
from Nagasaki and Hiroshima
to Dien Bien Phu
and Kinshasa
trees talking to each other
telling the truth
about agent “Orange”
still active in blood and bark,
about the Arkansas-made phosphorous
that blossoms white-hot
on the red flower of peace –
the bougainvillea
in Lebanon and Gaza

Elaine, Arkansas …
where the uncle of Richard Wright,
Silas Hoskins,
a free spirit while Black,
was lynched
before the second world war
because he owned a saloon,
houses and a garden full of trees
where the child Richard roamed free
and ate his fill
for the first time,
where perhaps the bougainvillea
that when consumed
satisfies hunger pains
had also bloomed …

Elaine, Arkansas …1917…
when hope-buoyed Black soldiers returned –
among them those who like Pink Brandon
were Black landowners
farming their own cotton
and proudly tending
their peach and pecan and persimmon groves
were either massacred
or imprisoned
so their acres and trees
could be stolen by white supremacist greed –
and when in 1919
the Black trade unionists and farmers
united
to say Enough
they were annihilated
by vigilantes, the police and the army
and
prisoner Bro’ Brandon
was one of those forced to bury
the remains of his own kin,
acres of beloved skin,
in the very soil that had belonged to him
and his descendants
today
remember where
and right there
along that hallowed trail
a first willow tree was planted
later felled by lightning
then a second willow
later eaten by pesticide
then a third willow
later desecrated by a hate crime –
but
as long as a willow sapling
can rise from a simple twig
the willow generations
will cool their hate-burned feet
in the wood wide web
of excavated memory

listen…
trees have
their own dialect
speaking
beneath our feet
re-membering
their boughs
weighed down
with our ancestors’ bodies
and
these trees bear witness
to their weaponization
in the enterprise
of genocide

listen
to the lament
of forests of Aleppo pine
introduced by the zionists in Palestine
to cover up the ruins
of massacred indigenous villages
where olive trees like humans
are displaced
and erased
as part of the memoricide
to be replaced
with fake picturesque,
artificial landscapes,
amnesic tourist trails
and playgrounds where Israeli children
are meant to forget
about the bones beneath

listen
to the story
of the sickened trunk of the imported pine
who dying in the alien soil of
the massacred village of Mujaydil
split wide open
allowing a repressed olive sapling
to sprout
and
thrive

listen and learn
from the unity of the forest
awakening
from its grassroots

everywhere
where trees are allowed
to breathe and speak
light is gathering

(c) Julia Wright. 23 November 2024. All Rights Reserved to the planting of a Silas Hoskins Garden in Elaine Arkansas for the disenfranchised youth descending from the 1919 Race Massacre. Donations to: molsonconnect@yahoo.com

Fighting Words

Journal of the Communist Workers league

BIBI IN BUNDY STYLE | PLEASE CUT YOUR CAMERA | THE BONES BENEATH

Poems by renowned Black leader and activist Julia Wright