ONE TWO THREE VIETNAMS

NYU withheld diploma from Logan Rozos for speaking out against Gaza genocide at graduation.

to Mohammed Khatib of Samidoun who made time to uplift us with his words on Mumia’s 71st Birthday even though he had just been released from illegal arrest a few hours before.

the sweat
and blood-bespattered
ribs
of the slave ship’s hold
were
the bars
of our first ancestral prison

the slave patrols
encircling
the plantation
created
our first concentration camp

the survival
of the empire
rests
on the ability
to mass incarcerate

Blackface Langley’s
ominous words accusing Captain Traore
of corruptly using
his own sovereign gold
were only the tip of
a very old iceberg

beyond those empty accusations
quietly
the puppet AFRICOM general
had been visiting
all the African countries
bordering
the Association of Sahel states
planting
lookout bases
and
signing military agreements
with
the house niggers
in power there
to build
a cordon sanitaire

the aim being
to surround
Burkina Faso, Mali
and Niger
with the geopolitical prison bars
of hostile neighbors
welcoming
american drones

the western strategy
was to treat
President Ibrahim Traore
as a prisoner
landlocked
by western military power

the US empire
who places behind bars
our Mumias
by landlocking them
away from families
and impacted communities
are taking the same tactic
to Africa
where Lumumba
Nkrumah
Sankara
and
Gaddafi
similarly isolated
were eliminated

But today
we ask
who is doing the encircling ?

Che’s battle cry
was to create
“One, two, three Vietnams”.

Against the mad dream
of a Golden Dome
Trump now wants erected
thanks to Elon Musk and Lockheed Martin
three merging fronts of People’s power
are revving up :
GAZA
grounded in its own exemplary resistance
supported by a growing anti genocidal
and anti imperialist world,
THE ASSOCIATION OF SAHEL STATES
supported by a Pan African Revolution
that is moving the planet
and
ENCLAVES OF U.S. PROTEST
inside the belly of the beast
from the student encampments
to the workers
and rebels of interfaith
all linking up
to prepare
a definitive
and irreversible break
from the imperial prison
that
regardless of borders
chains each
and every one of us

THE FEAR OF LETTING FEAR GO

for Ibrahim Traore, Mohsen Mahdawi, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur

In memory of my lynched great uncle, Silas Hoskins, who was memorialized by Bryan Stevenson in the National Lynching Museum in 2022

to the youth, children of the descendants of the 1919 Race Massacre in Elaine, with all my love

thanking John Coltrane

we hang on to fear
to survive

fear is necessary
to our life in the colonialist wild

fear is in our DNA

on the plantation
our Black forefathers
were tortured
in front of their pregnant women
so fear would
be transmitted
to us
the unborn

we who are back today
in the loop of Jim Crow 2.0
we know
that we carry within
an inherited
frightened
ancestral
child
still fleeing
the dread
of legions of lynchings
unredeemed

fear is a Black scar

dread
created the indelible lines
seared in our minds
of the white terror
of Apartheid

but then
Che made us define revolutionary love
and
we found
that if we could love enough
fear would disappear

we found
that if we could love enough
our lost kin
and
our homeland could not be ravished
from our souls

just the other day
on April 30th
as the world moved for him
we listened
to Ibrahim Traore say
they try to instill fear
to make us cowards
they come into our Palaces
they threaten us directly
or in a veiled way
they tell us
Sankara tried to do it like this
and where is he?
he is dead
they tell us
Gaddafi tried to do it like this
and where is he?
he is dead
all this to scare us
and
we say
The Homeland Or Death – We Shall Overcome
we are not afraid*

on the very same day
thousands of miles away
in the USA
after a Vermont judge
released him
from ICE clutches
we understood
the feelings of love
that made the Columbia student from Palestine
Mohsen Mahdawi
declare
loud and clear
to Trump and his cabinet
I am not afraid of you
what we are witnessing now
is exactly what Dr Martin Luther King said:
injustice anywhere
is a threat to justice
everywhere

Assata wrote
love is the acid
that eats
all bars

and
every day
Mumia Abu-Jamal
buried alive
under concrete and steel
signs over and over again
lovenotphear
lovenotphear
lovenotphear

when i am afraid
i put on
Love Supreme
and
i listen

THEIR TIME, OUR TIME

so much of the time
we forget Time

so much of the time
we sit mindlessly
letting Time go by

so much of the time
our mind
treats Time
as a straight line
of automatic
and renewable credit

but the prisoners we work
to free
from prison without parole
live in another world
where Time
is weaponized
with torture aforethought

in death by incarceration
Time is the means
death is the end

death by incarceration
throws
a sundial shadow
on our own sense of time

death by incarceration
is a litmus test
letting us know
if our own abolitionist clock
is on Time

every time
we say
“let’s do it next time”
a prisoner is in Time lag
of desperate hope

if we say
“the time is not ready”
or
“we need more time”
we do not have the luxury
of putting their carceral Time
on pause
or rewinding their clock

if we keep saying
in wanna be ante bellum style
“tomorrow is another day”
we are turning death by incarceration
back
to plantation Time

1925-2025 – A CENTURY OF GRADUATION RESISTANCE

“The school term ended. I was selected as valedictorian of my class and assigned to write a paper to be delivered at one of the public auditoriums. One morning, the principal summoned me to his office.
“Well, Richard Wright, here’s your speech, ” he said (…)
“What speech ?” (…)
“The speech you’re to say the night of the graduation” (…)
“But, Professor, I’ve written my speech already”
“Listen, boy,you’re going to speak to both white and colored people that night. What can you alone think of saying to them ? You have no experience…”
I burned. (…)
“Professor, I am going to say my own speech that night”
He grew angry.
(…) ” Suppose you don’t graduate ?”(…) I’m the man who says who passes at this school” (…)
I served notice that I was making my own decisions from then on (…)
On the night of graduation I was nervous and tense; I rose and faced the audience and my speech rolled out”

Black Boy, by Richard Wright – Chapter Viii,

if your university
blackmails
you –
no pun intended –
into a discourse
that betrays
your sense of
who you are
and
who you are fighting for-
fight against it

exactly a century ago
in 1925
the Black Boy
who was to become Richard Wright
was dictated
his valedictorian speech
but he rebelled
and insisted
on delivering his own
however flawed

today
Logan Rozos
is charged
with “stealing”
graduation ceremony time –
his crime?
speaking ex tempore
of the genocide
in Palestine

if in your university
they teach that time
is a consumer good
that can be shoplifted
or stolen
then
the time has come
to abolish
that corporate notion

if your university
egg times your mind
thirteen to a dozen
the time has come
to let it know
there is a vast
real time world
resisting
beyond the ivy prison walls

don’t go gentle
into their dark elitist halls

YOU CAN’T PUT A PRICE ON CREATIVITY, BUT YOU CAN PUT A TARIFF ON IT

“You can’t put a price on creativity but you can put a tariff on it”
Robert de Niro’s acceptance speech on receiving the Palme d’Or at Cannes a few days ago.
To Richard Wright for his “Between the world and me”
To Refaat Alareer for his “If I must die”

have you noticed
the masters of the plantation
and the segregationists
have little ability to create art
except for statues of themselves?

have you seen
how they crave
the masterpieces
they steal from us
for their musems?

have you noticed
how poetry –
the language of the soul –
is a land
they cannot take for themselves?

perhaps it is because
narcissists
and the killers of the dream
cannot feel

all they can do is
turn emotional coldness
into fact
life into stillness
change into algorithm
breath into chokehold
art into search of tariffs
and control

but
poetry
is an endless iridescent question
that disturbs –
a flying high
of the imagination’s kite
escaping the missiles
of fact
and undeterred

facts can only be mass manufactured
to suit the absence of affect
that keeps the child
unmilked of hope

those who are so crippled
that they are incapable of love
seek refuge
in fact-ifying the world

those who are so crippled
that they are afraid of love
worship fact
as the trophy of the creativity
they killed

those who are loveless
and murder the poet
have breathed in
more than their share of the world
but
cannot exhale

Fighting Words

Journal of the Communist Workers league

ONE TWO THREE VIETNAMS | THE FEAR OF LETTING FEAR GO | THEIR TIME, OUR TIME | 1925-2025 – A CENTURY OF GRADUATION RESISTANCE | YOU CAN’T PUT A PRICE ON CREATIVITY, BUT YOU CAN PUT A TARIFF ON IT

Poems by renowned Black leader and activist Julia Wright