Poem for the young white man who asked me How I,an Intelligent ,well Read person,could believe in a war between Races

Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe in a War Between Races

by Lorna Dee Cervantes

In my land there are no distinctions.  

The barbed wire politics of oppression  

have been torn down long ago. The only reminder  

of past battles, lost or won, is a slight  

rutting in the fertile fields.

In my land  

people write poems about love,  

full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.  

Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps.  

There are no boundaries.  

There is no hunger, no  

complicated famine or greed.

I am not a revolutionary.  

I don’t even like political poems.  

Do you think I can believe in a war between races?  

I can deny it. I can forget about it  

when I’m safe,  

living on my own continent of harmony  

and home, but I am not  

there.

I believe in revolution  

because everywhere the crosses are burning,  

sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,  

there are snipers in the schools…  

(I know you don’t believe this.  

You think this is nothing  

but faddish exaggeration. But they  

are not shooting at you.)

I’m marked by the color of my skin.  

The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly.  

They are aiming at my children.  

These are facts.  

Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my  

“excuse me” tongue, and this  

nagging preoccupation  

with the feeling of not being good enough.

These bullets bury deeper than logic.  

Racism is not intellectual.  

I can not reason these scars away.

Outside my door  

there is a real enemy  

who hates me.

I am a poet  

who yearns to dance on rooftops,  

to whisper delicate lines about joy  

and the blessings of human understanding.  

I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and  

bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn’t fade out  

the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage.  

My own days bring me slaps on the face.  

Every day I am deluged with reminders  

that this is not  

my land

and this is my land.

I do not believe in the war between races

but in this country  

there is war.