Hi there,I am darkdaughta. My home blog is here. I received an invitation to come post as part of the peace tree. I haven't written a poem for about four years...but that's probably because my prose, coming now mostly in the form of blog posts, flows over into poetry when it serves and back into a more strict letter/journal format when I so choose.
Before I launch into my reason for posting here, today, I just want to say thanks for the opportunity to once more let poetics flow from the tips of my fingers in ways that bring pictures, emotion and spirit. I appreciate the opportunity.
So!
I thought about peace, I wanted to write peace here, today.
But it felt fleeting and insubstantial.
In truth, I'm not strictly peaceable. I don't believe in turn the other cheek. Too many of my people's have been sacrificed to that doctrine.
I want my children to live. And for them to live, they will need to know when and how to fight. They will need to know that there are imperialist wars that are always unjust and that there are defenders who fight to remove various oppressive boots off the necks of the people. They will have to be able to tell the difference...even when the imperialists use the rhetoric of liberation to bolster their cause...even when those who fight because they must scorch the earth and cry tears of regret over the harm they have caused in support for their causes.
My children will have to think critically and be able to fight even more critically.
I hope this doesn't X me out as a suitable blogger posting on matters related to peace. I prefer it to war and dream of a day when there really are no more wars to be fought.
I will not live to see this as I know that Iraq and Afghanistan are really just hot points, skirmishes, not the only unjust wars happening all over the globe.
And so, yeah...
I'm thinking about the fact that I grew up during the cold war, constantly afraid of being bombed into oblivion or of surviving with toxic, cancerous side effects.
I understand that as the war progresses, even if it should stop tomorrow, the rage harboured by those who have been harmed in other countries will continue. This means that they will bring our fight, the battles of our intrepid warlords home to all of us and to our families and friends.
But even if this doesn't happen any time soon, I understand that there are ongoing battles being waged against people of colour on this continent. Mass imprisonment, criminalization, coerced sterilization, poor food leading to even poorer health, substandard education, lived, daily experiences of oppression...these I understand as the tools of war at home.
But even aside from this, I know that there is an older war happening here right under our noses. There is a war happening against the original custodians of these lands. Our homes are built on land where they lived and hunted and birthed and fought and made confederacies and spoke to their dieties undisturbed.
These peoples are still here...some of them, anyways. Some have vanished from the face of the earth and will not walk here again. I understand that I have played a part in this, that we've all played a part in this ongoing disappearing.
There has been war here in this place for centuries. I have always known war.
I'll write war...becuz I don’t know how to write peace
still here on stolen land/ war
all I know at “home”
