Invasive
Intrusion
Colonizer
Usurper

You who do not belong
Before

Who cause destruction
                                           devastation
                                                     ­             violent change
Now

Your presence means
An absence
                       of others

Yet
However you came
Wherever you came from

You’re here
Now

You will be here
Into the future

Is there a way
A path forward?
Amidst this change
Your coming has wrought

To make you
No longer invasive
                                    alien

How can we integrate
Our invaders
Our colonizers

Change can build
Even as it destroys

Whether thru the passage of time
Or conscious effort
Eventually
                      can the invader become native-made?

How can we make the process
Less destructive
                               Less devastating
                                                     ­         Less violent

                     Transform the invader
as much as
                     The invader transforms us

Take away their power
and ignore their pain.

But culture is perennial,
and no practice is in vain.

You’ve cut the line
but the call is still coming through.

Change is coming.
With or without you.

Take away their language,
but the land will teach them the way.

Knowledge and memories,
will always stay.

Try to obstruct their knowing,
haven’t you heard?

Your graining insistence,
is quiet like the blue bird.

The river is flowing,
the sun is still stirred.

Ancient lines of wisdom,
what are you afraid they might learn?

Your resistance to beauty,
beyond absurd.

When will you let them find freedom?
Surrounded by the colonial herd.

A resonant gratitude streams through my veins,
Consecrated to my middle school heroines, deflecting
The whispers of shame.
But they taught me that I do not have the luxury of shame;
I have a voice, and I must amplify it––that’s what my mother said.

Elles m’ont protégée, blossoming my oneness.
I am here now because of them, I harness their divine feminine
Strength.

Standing on the bones of my aunties, their anguish travels up,
Their histories following suit.
Beneath my feet, to my knuckles; charging my inner being
My spine is rigid, fortified with the duty––
To liberate, to reform, and to love.
“But my love,” she tells me earnestly, “this love, has been assumed,
Taken for granted, blended into the background of the White man’s portrait.”

My dun skin lives in the ambiguity of praise and prejudice,
And my sisters are dead. Exploited, first––then dead.
As were my mother’s grandmothers, when the Britons drew the line.
The assembly line, however, was an American invention––
Where the American Dream came to fruition. Commodified neatly,
‘Cheaply’ produced, and easy to swallow: fine [Black*] American craftmanship!

Her tomb
Stone, will be mined by her brothers.
He is unearthing the buried history, but forced to push coal into the fire,
Cremating the legacies of his own kin.

“So what are you going to say at my funeral now that you’ve killed me?”
Her lasts words, found amongst the ashes.

The interviewer, who was white,
asked the indigenous man, who had dark brown skin,
What was most important in life to them.
'Them' - as if the man and his people were any different
than the interviewer and his.

This was after the man had shown them
(the interviewer and the cameraman)
his entire village - the homes,
where the women forage for food
and how the men hunt for meat.

The man knew what the interviewer was really asking.
Yet he also knew that the interviewer already knew
the answer to his own question - even if he had hidden it from himself,
even if he had no faith and trust
in his own culture’s answer to the question.
Still, the interviewer knew the answer for himself.
And the man knew also,
like everyone who is being filmed and interviewed,
that when someone asks you for your very essence,
it is never only a passing request.
They mean to do something with it at some point.
You see, the indigenous man doesn’t go around
interviewing white people.
He is living his life.

So, when the interviewer asked this question,
“What is most important in life to them?”
A shadow of remembrance passed across the man’s eyes.
And smiling, he replied, “Meat!”
The interviewer, looking perplexed, repeated, “Meat?”
and thought, 'Well, that’s a given.'
And in a tone that suggested
what he really wanted to say
was, 'Duh, what else is important here on Earth?'
The man replied, “Yes, with meat we become strong and healthy.
No one will go hungry.
Children will grow strong and run fast.
Women will be strong and there will be less sickness.
Women will give birth to healthy, strong babies.”

The interviewer’s face reflected blank ignorance
as he again repeated, “Meat?”
And with eyes that said, 'Now let it go.
You will not get from me
what your grandfather took from mine',
the man turned to his son and said,
“We will go hunt now.”

( Emperor Menilik II)

An enemy
That covets
Your land, your
Gold-bestowed
Natural wealth
And your wife
Creating a strife
Stripping you of
Your liberty
And identity
Is all out
To mar your life!

This blatant aggression
Standing together
It is better we deter.

So, if intentionally
Or otherwise
On you, if
I might
Have posed
A grievance
To date,
I ask apology
Let us bury
The hatchet.

Among us,
An axe to grind
For a divisive wedge
An enemy cruel & wild
Must not find.

Thus, while
In full command
Of your health
If you fail
To march
To the front
I will take that
To the dignity of
Our sovereign nation
And me
An affront.

I swear to God
I swear to God
Up on return
There is
No restraint
My anger
My punitive
Measures against
Such malingers
Back to hold.

Of course,
We need
The prayer
Of the feeble
And the old,
The heavily-armed
Invading army
When we fight
Supper bold.

I assure you
By the grace
Of God
Victory for us
Is what
The future hold.

(The Chief of the provision wing)

Women of the nation
Pull your sleeves;
As provision
Dry food—
Roasted chickpeas
Roasted peas
Dry meat—
If you prepare
It will be good.
Also to boost
Immunity in
The original way
Prepare and ready
Garlic, red chili
And ginger
In a form of
A powder.

(The principal of transport)

Array pack animals
Provisions to transport
From every corner
Of the nation,
The palace
To the battlefront.
S/he who has
A horse or a mule
Must come along
With some hays
For its fuel.

(The master of musicians)

Take on board
Musical instrumentalists
Vocalists, who
War songs that chant
About victory
At hand not hesitant.

(Traditional Health Professionals)

Also take aboard
Women, herbalists
That will nurse
The wounded
Back into shape
Also the recuperating
To fight back
Who help.

(The logistic head)

Our resource gap to fill
While in the battle mill
We have to take along
Bullet swaggers
Ammunition repairers.
Utilizing such skill
Would allow us
With limited resource
More troops to ****.
This way
The cavalry
And infantry
Will fight
About logistic
With little worry.

(Menilik II)

Let us march
Let us march
To the place of
Showdown
To write
Golden history
Like Golead & David
That has no match!

Let us be
A standard bearer
If united
Freedom fighters
Could a giant enemy
Like Goliad deter.

On my sword
I have engraved
Menilik’s power
Is Almighty God
So behold
Those who pick
Against the peaceful
A sword
Will perish by
The sword.

About colonization
As I earlier grabbed
The import
I had accessed
Enough arsenal
Via the port.
If divide & conquer
Is their aim
With Ethiopians’
Oneness &unity
I will foil
Their game
They will have
Themselves to blame.

In the meantime
King Aba Jifar
Taking over inland
Maladministration, disorder
Will bar
In such a way
Ethiopians’ chemistry
Will be heard
Wide and far.///

Sixteen letters
Two words
Is it
Too much to ask
of a people
That colonized worlds
And destroyed civilizations?

Let it slither
On your tongue
Let it glide
Down your throat
Until it rests
Close to your heart

Breathe it in
Until it dissolves
Into the crimson
That runs in your veins
And flows
Beneath your skull
Into your mind

For too long
I’ve cowered
Inside a cave of nicknames
And excuses

If you can pronounce
Daenerys Targaryen
You can say
My name

America was never just great
It was flawed first
It is practically an accident
But better here than India
The explorers came, and faster than a cinnamon skinned Arawak Native American woman could yell “the colonialists are coming!” The men in lily-white shirts shoved the unsuspecting indigenous off their land.

The explorers were as lost as Louis and Clark without Sacajawea
But a determined pedophelic peony planted itself in the deep brown soil
The invasive plant started a genocidal streak all over the continent
In return it won a couple cities and holiday and the Native Americans were bestowed with accidental exposure to smallpox and enslavement.  

To repay them we allotted reservations where people live in crippling poverty, put Sacajawea on a coin and Pocahontas in a movie yet we cannot fully allow them into our society, our neighborhoods, our schools because they are uncivilized.

The only people who have any business being on this continent are uncivilized. What a shame.

America still is not great
It still shows scars and old behaviors from the 1400s, 1800s, 60s and even yesterday. The Band-Aid was applied but the wound never washed, never sewn up.
So it sets, burgundy bruises and gore gaping at our present, our future.
America’s past is far darker than anyone’s skin but is accepted while brown complexions are not. America’s roots are not up for discussion, white supremacy is not real.

We are imagining things.

We weren’t turned away at white linoleum restaurant counters, we haven’t been isolated from the rest of the country, our sufficiency in the English language hasn’t been questioned, our bodies haven’t been sexualized, politicized
It’s all in our heads.

Our heads, spinning with fiction, are buried
Sinking towards the earth’s core, waiting to come out of the other side where oppression is not pressing down on us like a molten red brick wall. Our brown heads will come up out of the grass and be greeted by the sun and all will welcome us.

Indigenous knowledge and unwritten tradition
Ritual dances and pagan gods
She speaks to the deads
Heals the deepest wound
Whispers to the reindeers

But one day people with skins, the colour of snow, came
Untouched by her wisdom
Nothing she could do to stop them
The land was soiled
Purity went away

suffering Clots in my gut
humanity gurgles In my throat
holes drilled into the Veins of the earth
as i taste a country drenched in colonIzed blood on my Lips
a melting arctIc leaks from my eyes
weStern destinies fester in my chest
as the fissures in its surface smoke my lungs out like burning gAsoline
i can Touch each pole with the pads of my fingers
and shake the glassy world
one day i will lay flat and press my tongue agaInst the world
and feel it dissOlve in my mouth
like the fizzy tablet of Nothing it is