Poetry for the Other Brain
Over many millennia of human history, and even today among the most rational fields of endeavor, it is recognized that the greatest leaps of insight and wisdom emerge from, often erupt from, the non-rational part of our brains—our hearts. There's no greater known food for the heart than poetry. Dive in.
There is a place the fear must go.
There is a place the choice must go.
There is a place the loss must go.
— Alice Walker, "How Poems are Made:
A Discredited View"
The Poems
For the Imagination
When the dreamer dies, the dream begins searching for
someone else—someone who might take it in and raise it. It searches relentlessly, until it’s worn thin from longing. And when no one is found, it chooses to enter the world itself—as a human.
Over time, the living dream grows older, forgetting where it came from—or that it was ever a dream at all. It lives like the rest of us—growing into its body, drifting through its days, learning how to be ordinary.
One day, it begins to dream.
—From The Dream Incarnate by Nay Thit
For Solidarity with the Oppressed
Rise up and be born with me, brother.
From the deepest reaches of your disseminated sorrow, give me your hand.
You will not return from the depths of the rock.
You will not return from subterranean time.
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
plowman, weaver, silent shepherd:
tender of the guardian guanoacos:
mason of the impossible scaffold
...
Show me your blood and your furrow,
say to me: here I was punished
because the gem didn't shine or the earth
didn't deliver the stone or the grain on time:
...
I come to speak through your dead mouth.
Through the earth unite all
The silent and split lips
and from the depths speak to me all night long
as if we were anchored together,
tell me everything, chain by chain,
link by link and step by step,
...
Come to my veins and my mouth.
Speak through my words and my blood.
—From Heights of Macchu Picchu: XII by Pablo Neruda
—From Heights of Macchu Picchu: XII by Pablo Neruda
For Celebrating Human Resilience
My mother will leave me her mother's deep-black cast-iron skillet someday.
I will fry okra in it
weigh my whole life on its black handle,
lift it up to feel a people in my hand.
...
My mother made her body crooked
all her life to afford this little wooden blue house.
I want her green thumbs
wound around a squash's neck
to be wound around my wrist
telling me to stay longer. O what she grew with the dust
dancing in blue hours. What will happen to her body
left in the ground, to the bodies in the street,
the uncles turned to ash on the fireplace mantels,
the cousins we've misplaced?
How many people make up this wound?
No one taught my mother how to bring us back to
life, so no one taught me.
O what we gather and O Lord
bless what we pass on.
—From Inheritance by Tyree Daye
For Understanding Racial Strife
If you ever find
yourself, somewhere lost
and surrounded
by enemies
who won’t let you
speak in your own language
who destroy your statues
& instruments, who ban
you omm bomm ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep trouble
they ban your
own boom ba boom
you in deep deep trouble
humph!
probably take you several hundred years
to get
out!
—From Wise by Amiri Baraka
For Environmental Justice
We have a beautiful
mother
Her hills
are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
mother
Her oceans
are wombs
Her wombs
oceans.
We have a beautiful
mother
Her teeth
the white stones
at the edge
of the water
the summer
grasses
her plentiful
hair.
We have a beautiful
mother
Her green lap
immense
Her brown embrace
eternal
Her blue body
everything
we know
—From Her Blue Body Everything We Know by
Alice Walker
"And it was at that age… Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river...and it touched me."
—Pablo Neruda, "Poetry"