Yellowbird

My uncle Billy is the leading Little Debbie’s snack cake salesman in all of
North America.
From Miami, Florida to Vancouver, British Colombia, nobody
sells more fudge rounds, Swiss rolls or nutty bars than him.
My family is incredibly proud of this fact.
We tell it to strangers,
to the respective husbands of our nieces,
to the clerk at the drugstore,
we whisper it in church,
‘Did you hear about Billy? Yeah, he’s the leading Little Debbie’s snack cake
salesman in all of North America.'
And I will never write a poem that will ever come close to matching the
grandeur of that.
So you won the Nobel Prize, did ya? That’s nice. Did you hear Billy put five
hundred cream pies on the rack of a shop’n’save and in 5 days that rack was
freakin' empty
Why
is art the first class to be dropped by any public school?
Why are music rooms empty in junior highs from New York City to Nashville,
Tennessee?
How
can you burn CD after CD after CD while filling your tank with an infinite
amount of gas?
Like the war is worth funding but music isn’t?
Our culture is a prison.
And the only one with the key is little Emi Jones, covering every inch of her
standardised test with the best number 2 pencil version of a starry night
anyone has ever seen and yes,
there is a humming bird in her chest.
Its wings are beating 80 times a second,
but the second you and I will see that Doctor King did not write a speech
called I Have a Dream — he wrote a poem called I Have a Dream.
Y’all, I don’t know if God will ever have a purple heart, but I know we have a
bow
we could pull above the strings of a combat boot and make it sing
like the eyes of a 7 year old boy
staring down the barrel of Apartheid’s loaded guns;
screaming for the right to write stories; to sing songs in his Mother’s tongue
Point me in the direction of glory
I will run towards a tiny hand in the most wounded corner of Palestine,
dipping a brush into a can of yellow paint
to paint a feather on a wing on a wall that is so tall, only yellow birds can
escape
But when they do, they carry the hearts of children on their backs
and when their wings flap, they make the sound of anthems being replaced with
sky.
And I swear, I could see their shadows pass across your glowing face
the night you said you have never given birth to a child
but you tear every single time you write a poem.
We are growing our future
with every borrowed pen
I pray tonight we would write a rain that would fall like the tears at Folsom
Prison the day Johnny Cash smashed his guitar over apathy’s head.
The way Frida Kahlo — in the prison of her own body — had whole years where she
could paint nothing but red
but she painted
to the bars in the locked cells of her pores.
The same way saxophones in New Orleans played music underwater,
knowing some of those notes would rise up to the air carrying people and hope
to shore.
I don’t believe in the godliness of steeples, but I believe in the stain glass
and every key on every organ that is desperate for light ‘cause we are
desperate for life —
for the sight of a captivated audience refusing to be held captive in the
thought that they can only listen and watch.
Picasso said he’d paint with his own wet tongue on the dusty floor of a jail
cell if he had to.
We have to create;
it is the only thing louder than destruction;
it is the only chance the bars are gonna break.
Our hands full of colour
reaching towards the sky — a brush stroke in the dark
It is not too late
That starry night — it is not yet dry.