Tag: #blacklivesmatter

Love Beyond God

.Reading time 3 minutes.

I am thrilled to share with you all the publication of my first collection of poetry/meditations for the Unitarian Universalist Association and Skinner House Books.  There are many people to thank for making this happen, and I will try to capture a few of them here.  Thank you Mary Benard and the Skinner House board for actually taking the chance on this work and thank you Marshall Hawkins for pushing me through the editing process. Much gratitude to readers, colleagues and mentors Jim Mitulski, Marta Valentín, Janice Marie Johnson, Jo Green, Dalila Butler, Lee Whitaker, Shaun Travers, Clyde Grubbs, Roy Whittaker, Joellynn Monahan, Kenny Wiley, Charlie Sullivan, Chip Smith and Mark Morrison-Reed (and so many more!) for egging me on and really hearing me. Thank you to First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Diego, Mount Diablo Unitarian Universalist Church, the Pacific School of Religion and PolicyLink for continuing to support me through this project. And finally to friends Scott Nicolay, Talvin Wilks, John Hennessy, Ben Bobkoff, Benjamin Dunks, Nicola Rosewarne and Jamin Shoulet who all light creative fires under me that will never be extinguished.

And of course the biggest thank you to my entire multi-cultural, international and wildly over educated family. I love you all!

 

Excerpt from Love Beyond God

First Breath

That first breath must be delicious.

It must be more tantalizing,
more intoxicating than any drug,
fragrant like no flower will ever be
enticing like no body scent.
It must be all of this, and more
yet without words or memories, how do we know?

That first glorious rush of air
wants us to keep breathing
wants our hearts to keep beating
wants our eyes to open and see
wants our souls to open and say “yes.”

The first breath wants us to live all our life saying,
please God,
let me live
let me breathe
for just one day more
until we breathe our very last.

Order your copy from Skinner House Books Here:
Love Beyond God Thumb

UUA Bookstore Love Beyond God

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now available on Amazon for Kindle: LOVE BEYOND GOD (electronic)

Read more in the latest issue of UU World here:

UU WORLD Summer 2016UU World Summer 2016

 

 

 

 

 

Please post a review on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29823791-love-beyond-god?ac=1&from_search=true

 

A Song for Brown Bodies

.Reading time 3 minutes.

I’m reposting this poem that appears in “Love Beyond God”.

I am sick with the onslaught of lynching and physical terror to which we have become accustomed and complacent.  The time to act is now.  Fuck respectability and not offending people’s sensibilities and playing the damned game.  This is not a game, it is life and death.  My life and my death.  

I try to hold the precious gift of this body called “black man” with graceful defiance, marching in the face of those who would dispose of it like so many used rags, walk by it with no recognition except fear or reduce it to cliches and childish curiosity of the totally unfamiliar other.  If you will not join me in this quest…then get the hell out of my way.

A Song of Brown Bodies

Each morning I wake
And see “me” as one of many

    Brown bodies
    Brown bodies

And my own skin and hair
Has the same shadows and light
As what I see online…

    Brown bodies
    Brown bodies

Lifeless and limp
Or trying but failing to flee
Battered and broken…never free

Could be me…

    Brown bodies
    Brown bodies

Scattered in streets
Grotesque golliwogs
Raggedy animated
By “white” imagination
Like puppets…playthings
For the progeny of hate.

    Brown bodies
    Brown bodies

Used for a target, tune or fuck
Diversions of passion
Co-opted visions
The promise of “change”

    Brown bodies
    Brown bodies

Living on the wrong side of “gentrified”
A fetish for the hipster “dark side”
Always “columbused” then ghettoized

    Brown bodies
    Brown bodies

Sacrificed to places
Where water poisons
And viruses thrive…

Where language fails
And walls rise…

Where war rages
And rape cries…

Where profit outpaces peace
And hope dies.

    Brown bodies
    Brown bodies.

Yet, the blessed curse
Of genetic fecundity
Means no onslaught of nature
Or man-made conflict
Or in-bred hatred
Can delete the DNA
That comes back for more,
Millennium and again.
It is the human penchant
For pandemic procreativity
That means there will always be

    Brown bodies
    Brown bodies…

Do not believe what we are taught to be.
Each morning we all must arise
To see ourselves among the many

    Brown bodies
    Brown bodies

Embracing these colors of earth
Breathing the sigh of the sky
Quaking with the power of mountains alive
And feeling the spray of oceans
As we awake to celebrate

    Brown bodies
    Brown bodies

Where dance is blood
Where song is vision
Where touch is art
Where rhythm of heart
Pulses through words
And tumbles in rhyme,
Lovingly schooling the wicked
And scorning the vainly wise.

These are the real

       Brown bodies
       Brown bodies

Each one is precious
And holds the legacy
Of what it means to be wholly alive in

Brown bodies
Brown bodies