I am carrying names around.  Chants of grief and confusion.  Chants of love.  I know deeply loss and longing but there are things I do not know.  Nightmares that walk up to you in the day or under the moon and steal your child.  White supremacy is predator energy manifest.  That is not a metaphor.   Trayvon Martin,  Jordan Davis, Renisha Mcbride are not metaphors.  Real things in the real world that must be done like repeal these stand your ground laws and the spirit cries out to take them back from a world so sick at heart it must say out loud- they were good, they did nothing wrong.  To sing these names as they were given with love and to not forget.  

This is a poem speaks to the madness of white supremacy and I feel that madness right now.   

It Was A Long White Night

I can not speak

                  it breaks under me cold and brittle
                  it cracks and turns to dust in my worn hands

the hands of a house cleaner
the hands of a woman
last night despair and maddening thirst
to know culture
what it feels like to be inside
not seeing, buying or appreciating but being
forever
             birth, life, death always belonging

like driving by the Grand Canyon or taking a picture of it
or living in that wide, deep place so that every stone
knows the rhythm of your breath
the weight of each bone set in motion

in the car next to me at the stoplight
white boys yelled, Take that stupid sign off your car!
You ugly lesbian dyke!
The sign asks How many white men were attacked after
the Oklahoma bombing for looking like Timothy McVeigh?

I had to laugh, what else can you do?
Especially at lesbian dyke as opposed to heterosexual dykes?
they were not laughing
their faces flushed red in that way white folks get
when we are angry,
we blush like that when we are making love too
but I didn’t think of that until later at home
in the bath tub, I choked on tears
while my neighbors through the apartment wall cheered on
the football game

it wasn’t their anger that got to me, I’m used to it
it was this thirst
                           I carry like grief

they carry like weapons.

I can not speak, whiteness
does not even use the same language
black pride means loving yourself
white pride means burning crosses
we don’t say white folks and hear home
don’t know how home might feel
we’ve lost so much
we often don’t even know
we are lost anymore

so when they ask me
I will have to say yes
yes, I know the hard set faces
of young white men
the cruel mouth spitting
the flat lean bellies
the red flush of beer and hatred

                                                  I have studied for my own survival
                                                  for the sake of sanity, angry white men

waving the flag to ward off the sky
the blue that could break something in blue eyes
and yes,
I do
and do not
claim them
as my own.