Yesterday I followed, on the site of the Academy of American Poets, a discourse between a white male poet and a black female poet about race, and a series of letters that she then invited to open up the dialog. One point made was that the community of poets was itself a small, white group, dripping with privilege, though thinking their modest salaries made them immune to such designation. I started thinking the issue was maybe not so much what people choose to say about race as who is saying it, whose voice gets the chance to be heard. And that this particular society of poets was perhaps a small group, and there were others, but their circles might never intersect.
Also yesterday, incensed by things I was hearing from the far right, I started to pen an apology to President Obama:
“I fear we are a nation of buffoons
I witnessed it on Youtube yesterday . . .”
(that’s as far as I got)
These two threads of thought wove together to form the following:
Trying to Make Ourselves Heard
We speak in fractured space
Our stories are refracted
confined within our shards
that cut off interaction
Our words reflect back inward
from the walls of our partitions
and no one on the outside
can hear us anymore
What does it matter to them what we have to say?
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
. . . . . babel . . . .
And so they left off to build the city.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 17, 2011
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