By Semaj Brown Flint, Michigan’s First Poet Laureate
Where am I From?
By Semaj Brown Flint, Michigan’s First Poet Laureate
Where am I from?
I am from the blood of fire river where the strike of friction against rock of flint smokes tongues of resistance lead burning brains and bodies of the resilient beautiful I am Flint, mid-west bio region reconfiguring the world Meet me where the watershed into bay of being fed by underground railroad tributaries escaping River Killers
I travel the coast, witness 400 decomposing beached whales A homeless polar bear traumatized by the color blue staggers by Am I drizzling in my Grandmother’s nightmare?
Where am I from?
I am from the conflagration incinerating the revolving rotisserie globe They have savaged our bodies and our land I burn for you our Breonna, oh our Breonna radiating volcanic social convulsions of African blazes
I am from a regurgitating country trying to grow a conscience in a petri dish Wheezing in the chemical crucible of casual killings as the tide of plastic rushes the shore flooding our veins
Where am I from? Hear the eulogy of rainforest choirs homilies rupturing in the throat of declining Orchids
Where Am I From?
I am from this Earth is my body, my lungs, a species, a sacrament dissimilar to any ever tasted the milk of, newer forever more than eternity the breath of
We magma our authority, lava our power where we, the Humble Crawlers of Light shout the Earth forward
We claim victory ingesting quest for justice, as daily bread, as we magma our authority, lava the reckoning— radiating inherited spiritual convulsions blazing, scorching, scalding, shouting the Earth forward with infrared eyes, an adaptation of the womb, wash in ash, emerge singed, fists like floating planets, tied to a standing arm of vertical hope— not knowing if dawn will break us, but declaring:
“We got this! We gonna be alright, we gonna be alright”
from the mountain where crows make revolution, from our mouths of cinder and soot, eviscerating, dismantling, dissolving— diabolical covenants
Where I am from biodiversity marches the Earth forward stampedes the Earth forward, tramples land mines, shouting monuments down, voting her forward, quaking, making, staking freedom imagining, imagining our futures forward— freedom Forward!