eleventh.transmission
POEMS
Break Your Skin Open
Three Poems by Karina Ramdath
Break Your Skin Open
Break your skin open, unpeel the truth -
are you a prejudice, discrimination, racism free area?
Am I?
Measure me measuring you.
Tell me what you see when this drooling man in his
wheelchair goes by you. What words would you say
if your child, your friend, your brother was gay?
Say it out loud that hate is not in your vocabulary;
do you say it, feel it, mean it… inside? Do I?
I didn’t stand up to you when you told the joke about
colourful people,
about crippled girls,
about the blind;
I turned my tear-tracked cheeks, laughing with you,
so you could slap me again
hiding that your humour
was digging pincers into my heart and my eyes -
breaking my skin open, opening my mind.
Say it out loud that hate is not in your heart;
do you sympathise when the boys
can’t get into the clubs, when the television
interviewer says he guesses
in this labour market anyone can get a job,
when a Canadian gets ejected, rejected, to another country -
oh wait he wasn’t born here - guilty or innocent?
Do you act against it? Do I?
Measure you measuring me.
Does it matter about the
colour of my skin, my hair, my eyes?
Does it matter about my vision acuity,
the wheelchair I ride,
the spasms in my face,
the slowness of my mind?
Does it matter about my money in the bank,
my bed on the ground, the jobs I try to hide?
It matters. It matters. It does matter.
Now embrace me embracing you
sinking pincers into your cheeks, making them raw
with grief,
hoping you open your capacity for love, for generosity, for action;
hoping that change will take minutes, not generations;
acting it out loud that hate is not in.
here and there
to be licked off
lips
drowned in the sea
Here my steps are met
by golden bean and golden moss
There I am in love
with thrashing sounds and
infatuated with tinted trees
Here I draw quick inspiration
the weight and breath of
glaciated curves and laugh
at red bumble bees
and here I lift my face
to open sky and know
the omnipotence of me
cannot exist without the
quiet struggle to make the
tallgrass
grow again
There I am not in love
Here I do love
inhale sweet sagacious space
glimpse the red-tailed hawk
listen to the grass
waving at me
as he perches on your nose
here is no lush tropical valley
where vines reach the sky
and echoes are lost
in the dense wet growth
Here the wolf willows and aspen
are my oasis
golden bean fades into
snowbell and lupine
brine yearning turns into
Here
I belong
Loss
is
the blank space
where your
words
should be
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