The Gold Formed in Supernovas
Out of the Supernovas
Where we
And all the gold were formed
We fell nightmarishly into a world of dreaming
From the crowns of our mother’s heads
Into swelling hopeful wombs
We plummeted
Mothers, you did not come from a rib
And, we definitely fell from your celestial wombs
Skies under the sky
The Twice Born
Born from two sacred furnaces
This is for every woman who has ever held a child’s hand
Until it was strong enough to walk
And, for every woman
Who has ever had to have her hand held
When choosing
Not to bring a child into this world
O-o-h child things are gonna get easier
O-o-h child things will be brighter
We waited until it was our turn to play
I came to earth to reclaim my Stetson hat
A cosmic Staggerlee
To hang on to this world as it spins around
And to not let the spinning get me down
The stars are both my cradle and my cenotaph
And in this līlla where our dreams collide
Spending lifetimes running from all the reasons
We came here in the first place
Running from each other
Why not build a world
A stronger world
A strong though loving world
To dream in?
Cowardly dreamers
Often our dreams dare not speak their names
Falling out of the strangeness and the charm
Like purposeful precipitation
We are the faces of our mother’s and our father’s
Agony and ecstasy.
We are the chain reaction
We are atomic shadows
Tattooing the ruins and the wreckage
Of yesterday’s dreaming
The wreckage we must stoop to rebuild
With our broken tools
And burned hands
We are the quantum miracles
That force the gods to come to earth
To intervene on our behalf
And a mother to offer us her milk filled breast
This Song of Experience and human abstract
Living in the concreteness
Where the mundane and divine clash
Our Ideas can’t be killed
Only their containers smashed
And their advent delayed
Rebuild the Tower of Babel
Five Stairsteps
Earth
Water
Fire
Air
And space
Build it high enough to shout at god
And to say:
Your confounding of our languages
Has never stopped us from writing a poem
Or a song
Or a prayer
Or even attempting to be reasonable with each other
We are many
нас багато
[nas bahato]
Thousands chanted this in Russia
At Aleksei Navalny’s funeral
Where it was illegal to be
And they aren’t covering their faces, either.
This is for Lulia and Daria Navalny
Who have vowed to carry his dream
And for all of the hope that Putin can never kill
Ideas can’t be killed
Only their containers smashed
And their advent delayed
This is for the sacrifices of
Myrlie and Medger Evers
Bayard Rustin
Mamie Till- Mobley and Emmitt Till
And the open casket that forced America to gaze into an abyss
That was also gazing
And for the patience
Of John Lewis
And all of the people
Who still continue to cross the Edmond Pettits Bridge annually
Even though it still continues to be named
After a Klansman
This is for the voice of Fannie Lou Hammer
Who told us
“Stay together children”
And the music of Martha Redbone
Who is a lover
And a Mother
And a sister, too
She is bold enough to ask god:
Why can’t we talk about it?
And for Donnie Hathaway who fell
And Roberta Flack who supported his sky
As long as she could
For Tammy Terrell who consorted with Marvin Gaye
Their words and music still work
And still matter
You are my loves
You are my heavens
You make me sing
La Dee Da
This is for all of the Women who
Like an Egyptian Goddess
Hold up the sky
Giving shelter to the earth
For the rage of Nadya Tolokonnikova,
Lead singer of Pussy Riot
And for Harvey Milk
And all of the us’s in the U.S.
And, for a bunch of other people, too
Who you won’t ever learn about in school
Because they are too diverse to be included
In orthodox versions of Ameri-can’t History.
Let our actions in the world
Build elegant lattice like ladders into afrofutures
In the likeness of the subatomic grid structures
Found in the gold formed in supernovas
(By Heidi Lindemann and Michael Perry)
(Image credit 1: Untitled, Firelei Báez / Smithsonian) (Image credit 2: Untitled, John Armleder / Museum of Modern Art)