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a literary journal published by the Black Earth Institute dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society

Akua Lezli Hope


To Fight and Pray

This bus driver for the disabled

was a preacher, who greeted me with exuberance

shining faced smile, who told me stories of his ministries

the founding of his several country churches,

leading a group of people who walked around my town

praying, significance deepening roots within

me over time as I thank them again and again

for doing prayer work, for being soul warriors,

for the concept I only now begin to grasp

of raising needed energy, of healing the ground

of protecting and cleansing and blessing

 

My thanks for his kindness to me

in my manual wheelchair, in my pained brokenness

for the anonymous bestowal of blessings on this

country place whose innocence has been stalked

by child/sex traffickers and kid’s hunger

drug dealers from frack zones flying into our small airport,

wife murderers who didn’t want to pay

for child support, its beauty lost on many born here

who turned to cooking meth and stuffing

dead bodies in closets of abandoned mansions,

whose pain relief became surprise addictions

 

I thank him for circling us with love

though frayed and wispy, still wreathing

green hills, for taking it to the streets,

not just sitting in pews,

remaining convinced among the convinced –

they made their insights actions,

their embodied souls put to the invisible work

of true belief and love

 

I joined a prayer procession on a downtown street

visiting hometown New York City one Easter,

we walked the stations of the cross in the Village

as if we rode a holy train, blessing and praying

from MacDougall to West 10th

manifesting an energy that cleared,

healed, a quiet amazement

 

A wonderful woman leader with Amnesty International

talked about using prayer to counter

the horrors we read about and sought to end

in our shared efforts to engage young people

to write, protest, fight the structures

that sanctioned torture and oppression

 

Now I know more about how much is needed

how deeply and profoundly every good

intention is required, how bricks require mortar

until we remember how to move and melt rock,

like pyramids from Giza to Teotihuacan

to Antarctica, to sing megaliths into

place and glory, how to transmute souls


Collateral Damages

Erosion of civility seeps out of every public orifice.

Unexplained noise jackhammers your quiet

green neighborhood at 7:15 am, you cannot

sleep because you cannot sleep,

the ground beyond your home is under siege

cement busted again and again

and again for your safety, infrastructure,

rubble piled high barring access

beyond your ramp, the sidewalk strewn

with rocky debris, ambulance crew

can’t reach you, dust rises, the stench

of tar turns your stomach.

 

You did not protest this incursion

though it sounds like bombs, as steel road plates

slam street holes, these are not munitions.

Though you were not asked, nor gave permission,

your peace is shorn from this quivering body of illusion

that Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan are elsewhere

that drowned bodies, scarred by bivalves

offering purchase on a southern border seawall,

are just more operational logistics shredding lives.

 

On tv you see Utica police shoot the 13-year old

child of Karen refugees in the back

as he lay face down on brutal concrete,

collateral damage from a daily domestic abuse

of clarity, of understanding, as cannibal

myth is extolled to a cheering electorate

and the pounding on your door at 7:40 am.

by a gas company contractor to move

a car you do not own, frightens you out

of any sense of normalcy, scares you,

awake again to the loss of reason

or forethought or kindness.

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Akua Lezli Hope is a paraplegic wisdom seeker who creates poems, patterns, stories, sculpture, & adornments. Her collections include Embouchure: Poems on Jazz and Other Musics (Writer’s Digest book award winner), Them Gone, & Otherwheres: Speculative Poetry (Elgin Award winner). A Cave Canem fellow, her honors include the NEA, two NYFA fellowships, SFPA award, Rhysling awards & multiple Best of the Net & Pushcart Prize nominations. She won NYSCA grants to create Afrofuturist, speculative, pastoral poetry & to explore disability poetics. She created the ongoing Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading series & edited NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators, the history-making first of its kind. Her speculative fiction is included in the ground-breaking anthologies Dark Matter and Africa Risen, among others. A graduate of Williams College and Columbia University Graduate Schools of Business and Journalism, she practices her soprano saxophone and dreams in the ancestral land of the Seneca.

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