Survivors
by Kathryn Waddell Takara
for June Jordan
I.
I am no longer alone.
Resolve. Not to run on hatred, but love,
love for the sake of the people I love.
Live.
The presence of human life
the miracle of survival
amidst concrete playgrounds
skeletons of welfare and drugs
mutilated products of racism
people who experience ignorance, deprivation and horror
on a daily basis.
I am no longer alone.
Poetry by oppressed children and dreamers
continues to appear like love.
Live.
“I would like to go
where the golden apples grow.
Where the sunshine reaches out
touching children miles about
where the rainbow is clear in the sky
and passersby stop as they pass by.”
Deborah wrote that. She was 8. She was poor.
She also wanted to travel.
I am no longer alone.
Resolve. Not to run on hatred, but love,
love for the sake of the people I love.
Live.
Questions of freedom and identity appear like dreams.
How can I be who I am?
How can I know and realize my potential,
be other than I am?
The Diaspora, the Exodus
the drums of victims
of destruction, of power
of overwhelming circumstance
living testimonies of injustice, indifference
and vicious consequences.
What took you so long to awaken?
II.
I am no longer alone.
Resolve. Not to run on hatred, but love,
love for the sake of the people I love.
I am alive and sacrosanct,
potential exists, power.
Move into the community of moment
toward the self. But who am I?
Individualism can consume like sleep
separating people, community, spirits.
The self unconscious masquerades like a fool
falls, becomes a victim, full of fear.
I am no longer alone.
Live. Victims revolt, become agents, subjects
collectively choose new verbs, new actions,
new symbols, invent double-speak and nurturing strategies.
I am no longer alone.
Resolve. Not to run on hatred but love,
love for the sake of the people I love.
Despite class analysis, exploitation of human life
for material gain and profit
despite egregious metaphor of Justice
I live blindfolded.
I try to balance the fate of the living
try to protect the victims.
III.
I am no longer alone.
Love to live, to survive.
So what if I work, speak correctly and dress très chic
like the powerful,
if I am no longer me, if I am silent to the needs
of the larger community
if I entertain delusions of ego
and no longer recognize who I am
where I am from, who my ancestors were.
If I no longer care,
victory is pyrrhic
and this is not survival.
I am no longer alone.
We are survivors!
We are strong to answer
on our own political terms
political as in group, as in community
as in language, as in power, as in life.
We assert and affirm new paradigms
praxis of the dispossessed
values, lifestyles, based on balance.
I am no longer alone.
Sisters and brothers conspire to understand
the processes of self-preservation, development
and forgiveness.
We demand and assume freedom
to stay alive to make life,
to incorporate new life into our lives.
We must arise collectively and assume responsibility
for the endangered ones.
I am no longer alone.
Seeking connections of love through self-love.
Then, I can love “the other.”
Revolutionary correspondences and distinctions
between what hurts me and who,
between what I am trained to accept and reject
or simply ignore,
between bribes and rewards.
Seeking to understand the tensions between us.
I am the critic, the lover, the nurturer
Archetypes all, myths all.
I am the poet, the creator, the chronicler.
I am here and I am there.
I feel the pain, I am pain.
I become yin and yang, you and me,
Both intrinsic to the struggle.
IV.
I am no longer alone.
There must be hundreds, thousands, millions
who feel as I do.
But how to connect our struggles and goals?
Hunger and famine affect 800 million,
a majority are women, a majority are Third World
or are we the First World?
How to connect with the dispossessed?
If I am dispossessed, so are you too.
The bonding has occurred in our humanness,
in our rituals, in the process of healing.
Solitary efforts soothe the conscience,
but do little to change the scale
of human misery.
How to connect with the victims?
We are all victims. How to scrape and axe away
at the minority status quo,
at the suffering syndromes of poverty, disease, despair?
We seek to be free,
to be who we are without fear,
without humiliation, without suffocation.
Free to assume fulfillment of our dreams,
To be responsive and responsible
for every aspect of our human beingness,
free to give to each of our lives a consecration
without equivocating, without sorrow.
We act on a moral and political stage.
I know I am no longer alone.
Resolve. Not to run on hatred, but love,
love for the people I love.
Live. Life. A celebration of community
where Joy transcends
like sisterhood, like brotherhood,
like struggle, like us.
We are no longer alone.
This is a perspective.
This is a faith.
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