Diary of an American

The Dalai Lama says that the world will be saved by Western women. Not any women, perhaps not all women, but Burning Women. Women who have stepped out of silence and into the fullness of their power. Angry women who love the world and her creatures too much to let it be destroyed so thoughtlessly for a moment longer.
Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman

we are called the weaker sex yet

we bear the children of this world in pain and blood.

Brown, Black, yellow, red

we have reared generations of nations.

We are the Native sisters. We have grown the food, skinned the buffalo dried the meat, carried the papoose on our backs.

In the white man’s nightmare world we are the disappeared, the bruised and beaten the invisible

We are the dark sisters. We have picked the cotton in the light for hundreds of years with the babies slung across our shoulders, to the music of whips and dogs

We have borne the white man’s black pleasures, rough and forced, in nights of fear and terror

Sustaining the weight of four hundred years of losing our sons and daughters to the whims of whiteness

The badge holds no hope for us. We press on, we women, we rise we say for centuries white women what they do to us they will do to you

you laughed

You have been spared the indignities of your brown and black sisters

riding high on the carriage of your privilege, blind and yet you now see you are also caught in the hierarchy of male whiteness

You sob, you cry out

“When we rise they react anger knifing us over and over

ever withholding our rights reversing them mansplaining lecturing they the voice of God–“

Listen now. in their insecurity white men are savages not gods

the brutes with the boots stomping us down the heels the jeers and the smears with them so tall by making us small they fear us and

I surmise

they’d rather see us die than rise.

They’d rather see us die than rise

their fear they fear us they do not hear

They do not hear until we march harsh burning, shattering glass screaming

screaming

And then they force feed us, whip us bend us , rape us until we shatter humbled, submissive under bridle and bit

broken.

we, the mothers we the carriers of the sacred, the soul, white men hate themselves so much they beat and kill their own souls

They have been killing their mother already. White men how many mothers have you murdered and made into living corpses in your power and wisdom?

We must save our babies from you

We must save ourselves from you

sneaking away in the night has not saved us

our silence is killing us we must

Rise

we are the forest fire destroying the dead and long useless structures before us we smoulder, we burn

Listen now, white man.

You will find the wolf you have beaten quiet you keep in a pen

untamed, and patient

waiting watching

for your mistake

We are growling. One day we will roar

then retribution

our anger terrible teeth tearing we dream of that day, the day we free the world from you

Your brute power keeps the simmering rattling lid down for now

and

we growl

We howl. Sisters, howl.