Sometimes You Have To Wear Your Heart On A Sleeve

Sometimes you have to wear your heart
on your sleeve
worship the Black Madonna
and remember the tall ships that
brought you in chains to the
shores that separated your children
and husband and flogged you and
made you kiss the boots of an overseer,
that stripped you naked and sold you
to the highest bidder,

sometimes

you have to wear the Flag of Palestine
draped over your Jewish heart, remember
that Moses and Jesus walked over the same
desert and the river parted with only a
staff held in powerful hands,
"Let my People Go",
in the land of the Pharaohs,
in the land of milk and honey
olive trees and 30-foot high walls,

sometimes

you have to wear a rainbow bracelet
and dance in the Gay Pride Parade
lest you forget how to
and you take yourself seriously
enough to stop dancing,
forgetting there's always two of you,
and you can dance alone,
you can dance to your own music,
a Sufi twirling

sometimes

you have to write petitions and ask
your government not to make war
in the land that gave us Rumi and
Hafiz, red white and green words
that speak of purity, the fire of love
in which every heart burns until
nothing remains but the green grass
of home...in a Persian silver dish  

sometimes

you wear the cuts of Rwanda deep in your
heart where no man can see
deeply enough
your hands are stumps and still you write
poetry, offering your blind eyes
drowning in a sea of blood

even as the eagle soars with your heart clutched
in his talons, and the drumbeat of the rhythm
spirits ascend after you have walked that trail
of tears...in a hundred years of solitude
and so you land on Macchu Picchu, the hollow flute
of Krishna still echoing in the Andes,
the alien has come home

sometimes there's not enough hope
for another day...the shining path is dark

sometimes you are lost in the silence
you have forgotten you have earned
a little love...

to lie down in the arms of the Beloved
for this is the day you have died.