internetz

i've been reading a lot of andrea gibson. and other than my dear friends sarah lawson (rememberwhenihadablog.blogspot.com) and justin searns (who guards his brilliance), she is certainly my favorite poet.

and i've found a bit i like a lot:

i've never seen a bomb drop.
i've never felt hunger.
i've also never seen lightening strike
but i know we've all heard the thunder
and it doesn't take a genius to tell something's burning.

"Please call me by my true name,
I am the child in Uganda all skin and bone."
Do we remember the rest?
And, "Jesus Wept."
Jesus wept, but look at our eyes,
dry as the desert sand
dusting the edges of our soldiers' wedding bands.

Do you know children in Palestine fly kites
to prove they're still free?
Can you imagine how that string
must feel between their fingers
as they kneel in the cinders of US-made missile heads?
You can count the number of the dead by the colors in the sky.

The bough is breaking.
The cradle is falling.
Right now a six-year-old girl is crouched in a ditch in Lebanon
wishing on falling bombs.

Right now our government is recording the test scores
of Black and Latino 4th graders
to see how many prison beds will be needed in the year 2015.

Right now there's a man on the street outside my door
with outstretched hands full of heartbeats no one can hear.
He has cheeks like torn sheet music
every tear-broken crescendo falling on deaf ears.

At his side there's a boy with eyes like an anthem
no one stands up for.

Doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who
aren't there.
It's that we ignore the ones who are.
'Til we find ourselves scarred and ashamed
walking into an emergency room at two am
flooded with a pain we cannot name or explain,
bleeding from the outside in.
Our skin is not impervious.
Cultures built on greed and destruction
do not pick and choose who they kill.

Do we really believe our need for Prozac
has nothing to do with Fallujah,
with Kabul, with the Mexican border,
with the thousands of US school kids
bleeding budget cuts that will never heal
to fuel war tanks?

Thank god for denial.
Thank god we can afford the makeup
to pile upon the face of it all.
Look at the pretty world.
Look at the smiling people,
and the sky with a missile between her teeth
and a steeple through her heart
and not a single star left to hold her
and the voices of a thousand broken nations
saying, "Wake me, wake me
when the American dream is over."

[andrea gibson-when the bough breaks]

and, sadly, this happened in south sudan
this is interesting based on uganda's recent politics around homosexuality

BUT, also little things to make the world a tad more beautiful. It's Friday. We start our adventure in Eldoret shortly and children in uganda have skateboards.