Collective Liberation Love Song
Full Moon, September 2, 2020
Collective Liberation Love Song
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine,
then let us work together.
—Aboriginal activist group, Queensland, Australia, 1970s
You are a cloud
a pear, liquid brown eye
with lashes over red thighs
staghorn sumac, opening
in the earth body you emerged
at the succession edge
where forest, field & water lay
you sing down from above
you give great swoops of flight
in rolling yellow finch strokes
the places you call here are home
you teach time by shade, by temperature
your ease is ocean restlessness
haunting whale song
your bodies are medicine
always curvaceous, never reduced
by the squint project of agrilogistics
your efficiency pronounced in chloroplasts
grace in minnows & malachite stalagtites
you are lover, relaxed, electric, sated
whom the wind of deserts cool
luminous creosote musk
your many folds erotic
full, enveloped, ripe
there is no other
there is no elsewhere
you allow wholeness
bringing tears
that rise up
up up
up
Poem by Qayyum Johnson
Painting by Suiko Betsy McCall. Organ of Vision, 2018. Ink on Yupo, 45×32″ suiko.art
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