Funeral Diva

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Funeral Diva Page 9

by Pamela Sneed

even my maternal hands can’t reach.

  In Poland, the Warsaw ghetto against a Nazi fascist regime

  On Southern Plantations, in fields, in Haiti

  On shores of Africa

  Uprising

  The ’60s

  The streets

  James

  Nina

  Bayard

  Miriam

  June

  Nikki

  Lorraine

  Audre

  Pat

  Malcom

  Martin

  Betty

  Sekou

  The Unnamed

  Artists

  Poets

  Teachers

  Always

  Uprising.

  POST-ELECTION

  Like trinkets sold at gift shops

  near former slave sites

  masks carved for tourist consumption

  paper promises given to those getting off the boat

  from somewhere

  those who crossed the desert, dehydrated

  raped, throat slit, still

  arrived by foot

  Like dollar-off coupons at Target

  going fast/buy now

  Hope and democracy are a poor woman’s

  last pennies spent to buy Christmas lights

  and ribbon at Rite-Aid

  Like children’s drawings with multicolored crayons

  displayed in elementary school windows

  Are what mothers fight for when their child

  is killed in a school shootout by an imbecile

  who had easy access to guns

  All the shooter wanted was to be like Kanye, a star.

  Like Dylan Roof in a courtroom shouting, “It’s not fair,”

  hearing the family of victims testify

  after he shot nine Black parishioners while their heads

  were bowed and they were praying

  The cops after took him to Burger King

  Like Jeffery Dahmer who ate the flesh and hearts

  of young Black boys

  He was killed in prison/stuffed in a broom closet

  And like the leader of the Rwandan massacre

  like a poet once said of an abusive father

  I’m glad

  So glad

  he’s dead

  Like candy spun by politicians

  dissolving as soon as your tongue reaches to taste it

  Hope and democracy are just words

  evading Walter Scott

  Trayvon Martin

  Emmett Till

  Mike Brown

  Akai Gurley

  Gift and Sandra Bland

  Hope and democracy are like old Harlequin romance novels/extinct

  As my friend says, “There’s no more love,

  only drama”

  Hope and democracy are slogans

  written on cups in souvenir shops on 42nd Street

  having nothing to do with our lives

  reality.

  ROPE-A-DOPE

  FOR SANDRA BLAND

  I had just begun to relax

  celebrate the marriage equality ruling

  I had just begun feeling with Obama I was

  watching Ali in trouble off the ropes

  delivering to his opponents the rope-a-dope

  my father’s eyes

  excitement

  I was just beginning to breathe air

  feel exhilarated at images of Joe Biden

  and President Obama running

  down halls of the White House with rainbow flags

  like boys with kites-soaring

  I was just beginning to forgive deaths of my brothers

  to AIDS

  not forget

  there should still be tribunals

  for them and every woman abused

  by the medical system

  I had just begun to turn a corner on Mike Brown, Freddie Gray

  Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, the massacre at AME

  not think of it all everyday

  Then the police kill this young Black girl in custody in Texas

  claim she committed suicide

  I remember we’re a war nation

  in war times

  I imagine how James, Bayard, Nina felt

  seeing a nation turn its dogs, teeth, gas, hoses, bullets,

  on children, adults, humans

  I can’t stop thinking about Steve Biko

  his battered face

  they say he hung himself too

  the world’s outrage

  who will pray now

  for us

  America.

  SILENCE=DEATH

  Speaking to my former student at SAIC, a writer and visual artist

  They say there’s not one day that passes when at some point

  They don’t return to the first reading I gave to the class

  on Audre Lorde

  The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action and

  Poetry is not a Luxury

  In a final paper, another student said she was floored

  but in the end grateful for the Audre Lorde checklist I handed out

  at the start of class

  Asking what are the words you do not yet have?

  What do you need to say

  What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day

  and attempt to make your own until you will sicken and die from them,

  Still in silence

  List them and write a new list tomorrow and the day after

  This in mind when I think about the image and words

  Silence=Death

  Like my students I return to the master teacher Black lesbian warrior

  mother cancer survivor and poet Audre Lorde

  I return also to the essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”

  with the instructions for living

  Silence will not protect you

  In this great dragon called America

  that attempts to wipe us out

  and it’s machinery that attempts to grind us

  into dust

  It is better to speak knowing we were never meant to survive

  So yesterday when I saw that poster silence equals death in the windows

  of the Leslie Lohman Museum

  That pink triangle on black paper

  from blocks away

  It called to me like a beacon

  Amidst societal madness/personal struggles and the Trump presidency

  to never give up

  It reminded me too of a generation of gay and lesbian warriors who are no longer here with us

  felled to AIDS and cancer

  But on their deathbeds used the mantra to inspire

  Silence=Death

  I think about when Black gay and Latinx poets Essex Hemphill

  Donald Woods

  Don Reid

  Roy Gonsalves

  Rory Buchanan

  David Frechette

  Craig Harris

  Alan Williams and Assotto Saint and so many more were still here

  How their black hair began to sprout twists and knots go wild and kinky

  to signify early Black gay consciousness

  I think about when I first met Donald Woods outside of a bookstore

  in the West Village called A Different Light and we fell in love

  We were all so young Black awkward and gangly but fierce and determined.

  Donald was Audre Lorde’s student at Hunter

  For all of us Black gay and lesbians struggling to find our way

  Lorde was our guru

  I think about poetry readings that happened all the time at

  the Community Center on 13th Street

  We were upstairs while ACT UP met downstairs

  There were Black gay and bisexual poets Storme Webber

  Cheryl Clarke

  Jewelle Gomez

  Sapphire

  As Black gay people we couldn’t afford to get arrested so we wrote
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  performed and sang revolution

  Like the salons of the Harlem Renaissance

  featuring Zora’s Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes

  These meetings informed me forever

  I also saw plague and cancer decimate my people

  People I imagined growing old with artists who knew at that time

  they only had moments and seconds to live so they wrote

  It was right after his diagnosis I saw Assotto Saint

  performing on top of the tables at The Gay and Lesbian Community Center

  I will never forget when he stormed the pulpit at Donald Woods’ funeral

  I learned what it was like to make work with urgency as Audre said

  as though your life depended upon it

  to know you couldn’t waste a moment or a second

  I learned more about being an artist in the early ’90s than any college education

  ever taught me

  It was from little boys with baby faces and death sentences who spoke

  and forced themselves into the world at all odds I learned

  From little and big boys and girls in the face of catastrophe

  Raising their fists as Avram did last night

  Uttering the mantra

  Silence=Death.

  FOR DONALD WOODS

  On the warm spring day Rory Buchanan died his friend

  a beautiful young Black gay man lay down on the ground

  outside of the funeral home and let out a gut wrenching scream

  He lay down on the ground, rolled back and forth as he cried.

  He did what we all felt but didn’t have the courage to do

  expressed in his actions battle fatigue, weariness

  of a young community that had lost so many of its own

  This might have been one month before we lost poet Donald Woods

  and members of a Black lesbian and gay community poured into a packed church

  hot humid with no outlet

  Poet Assotto Saint stood more than 6' 5" in heels, but on that day

  he wore a man’s suit and performed an act of exorcism and protest

  when he assailed the pulpit took over said Donald Woods did not die

  of heart failure, he died of AIDS and he was a proud Black gay man

  If you agree with me stand up

  And so today Whitney Houston is gone, Etta James, my idol,

  the soul train man who shot himself Don Cornelius, Heavy D, Howard Tate, Michael Jackson, Prince, Muhammad Ali

  Heath Ledger, Anna Nicole, Amy Winehouse

  Nelson Mandela

  so many who helped us know who we are and were

  but today I don’t want any lavish displays of grief and protest

  to do as they did in the Black church when spirit took hold

  you could see a weighted 300-pound body fly up and dance

  Today I want none of what happened with Rory or Donald

  Today I want to breathe breath let go past pain grief

  be the girl I was leap up sing dance not care

  let my tongue turn blue eating an icy

  walk down the street carrying a boom box

  singing Stephanie Mills, “I Feel Good All Over”

  to feel like I do when snow falls taking that first big gulp

  of something new

  the way I feel every time I board the plane to Africa or Europe

  and I’m racing over images stalls upon stalls

  filled with beauty and mystery

  to feel with myself the way students express feeling with me

  eyes open it affects everything

  to feel the way I do walking up the hill to a new school

  like a traveling preacher filled up with message

  Today I want to release all the things I could

  should have said

  be the student who said I changed everything

  even at home

  my teachings made him grow up

  become a new and better man.

  HOLD TIGHT

  On the Orlando shooting:

  Let’s be clear, it wasn’t Isis or Islam

  that licensed that man to walk into a gay bar

  and massacre those white and gay POC

  It was America with heinous gun laws that allow any white

  or white-skinned man with mental health problems

  to purchase weapons of war/machine guns with minimal background check

  Meanwhile Black and Brown people can’t

  walk through a neighborhood to buy candy, survive a routine traffic stop

  without being murdered

  No he wasn’t trained in hills of Afghanistan

  didn’t learn bomb making techniques from the Taliban

  It was here in America he learned apartheid policies

  Separate and unequal

  Separate schools

  Separate bathrooms

  Separate

  Separate

  Separate

  that breed a rampant repressed homophobe

  It was from demagogues like Trump

  that purport building walls and keeping people

  out and inciting fear fear fear

  It was America and the Bush clan

  that proved you could lie and kill and get away with it

  that certain populations were disposable

  I’ve seen these massacres before

  it was when Black and Brown queers were dying rapidly of AIDS

  only then the guns were indifference

  Guns were in hands of every American

  Guns were in hands of politicians

  of doctors

  in a system that hated queers

  I’ve seen it before this killing

  in the zig zag scars of women poets who died

  of breast cancer

  And institutions that still claim their legacy

  Like many I’ve searched the hallways for justice

  paced up and down

  begged to be heard

  asked for simple treatment

  for simple problems

  Gaslighted

  Bankrupted

  Run around

  Only to find out in America

  women’s wombs are big business

  I’ve seen this killing before

  It happens every day

  reality shows

  teaching us to step on and crush

  each other to get ahead

  A television that shows someone actually slicing

  Khaddafi’s jugular

  I’ve left so many places/communities

  because of safety concerns

  Sekou Sundiata died in the emergency room from a heart attack

  Willie Ninja, that beautiful, beautiful dancer went blind

  I could go on but my brother Essex Hemphill

  is calling to me

  telling me/us as he did in the crisis so long ago

  telling us to wrap our arms around each other

  and hold tight

  Hold tight

  Gently.

  SURVIVOR

  Contrary to popular opinion I never liked Diana Nyad

  in my mind overrated white woman

  ex-Olympic swimmer most recently swam from Cuba to Florida

  privileged

  thrill seeker

  daredevil

  doing voluntarily what so many POC

  are forced to do while attempting to gain freedom

  drowning in boats, falling overboard, terrible accidents,

  falling into the jaws of sharks, those waters a meat fest

  for predators, slavers.

  Sometimes I think about slavery and think if only those waters

  could tell the tale

  I’ve always wanted to say to those people who go on the reality show

  Survivor for kicks

  try being an artist and make it your career choice

  or how about a single mother or father trying to ra
ise a family

  on minimum wage living in an impoverished area

  try being someone who comes to America and

  doesn’t speak the language whose entire survival rests upon

  learning English

  arriving in a strange land, on strange soil, estranged from everything

  you have ever known

  like hitting your head against a glass door, or mirrors

  like optical illusions that used to be in the old fun houses

  or how about being uninsured and being sick for a number

  of years

  weathering that storm

  or insured but burdened with a costly illness

  health plans don’t cover

  or like so many of my students who are bullied to the point

  they have nowhere to turn and no longer have knowledge

  of their own name.

  No I never liked Diana Nyad

  until one day I caught a clip of her on Ellen

  I caught the part where she talked about her friendship

  with Superman Christopher Reeve who in real life suffered

  paralysis from the neck down.

  He looked at her in later years after she’d retired from swimming

  said he feared she wasn’t living her own dreams, that

  she was an Olympian

  And something about her conversations with him motivated her

  to try again, to listen.

  Maybe through her I saw the frayed ends of my own unlived dreams,

  my own fear that caused paralysis

  And so by the end of that conversation with Ellen

  where Diana talked about returning to her Olympic self

  by swimming from Cuba to Florida at age sixty challenging

  every notion of what it means to be an athlete, a woman,

  and the stereotypes of aging I was crying

  by the time she looked into the camera and said

  Don’t give up

  Never give up your dreams.

  CITIZEN

  A friend and I were talking after Trump’s election

  She remarked in the words of MLK, “There are really two Americas.”

  In response, I say, “There are probably seven, eight, nine, ten, twenty Americas, more than we can count.”

  I know that during the early ’90s during the early AIDS crisis, I saw another America

  As Hilton Als says, when the bodies of dead gay men felled by AIDS

  were being tossed out into the streets in garbage bags.

  I had many friends who were sick.

  I asked one guy, “What took so long with Medicare, why all the red tape?”

  He said, “They are just waiting to see if I die first.”

  It felt as if someone dropped ice water on me

  I was so shocked

 

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