Poet’s work highlights tragedy of racism (letter to the editor)

Inspired by my creative Staten Island friends, Poet Laureate Marguerite Rivas, who posted a poem every day in April, and editors of Poets & Writers, Mary Gannon and Kevin Larimer, whose book on writing was just published in April, and in full acknowledgment of the gigantic holes in my education, I bought "Incendiary Art, a Pulitzer Prize-winning, multi-award-winning book of poetry from a CSI English professor and national luminary, Patricia Smith, not really knowing what the subject was about. It is a never-ending eulogy, witness and compendium of the violence of White America on Black America, an incomplete anthology, unfinished, as the murder of Ahmaud Arbery is revealed.

As we, White America, are outraged at the killing of another black son, and yet remain impotent to react cohesively to it, reading the work of Patricia Smith is the smallest act of awareness and acknowledgment of the systemic racism and white supremacy that, unlike Ahmaud Arbery, is allowed to run openly through this very broken country.

So, for Mother’s Day, I’m thinking of Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, and the mothers of Emmet Till and Eric Garner and Rodney King and Michael Brown and Sean Bell and Sandra Bland, and ...and .... and.

As armed white men storm state houses spewing infected spittle in the faces of rule of law, and occupy coffee shops with grenade launchers and saunter down main streets locked and loaded, let us prepare not our alibis, not our excuses, not our fast and fleeting outrage. But, let us prepare to be led by the example of the poets....and mothers.

(Lorie Honor is a Stapleton resident.)

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