POETRY Reading: We Are All Immigrants, by Karla Freeman
POETRY READINGS
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1m 59s
Performed by Val Cole
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POEM:
written after the Syrian crisis
It doesn’t matter where we go
Or even where we stay,
We are all immigrants
Some leave home
To arrive as immigrants
Some stay in place
But feel displaced
Who is Turkish these days?
Who is American?
What is a Londoner?
i visit Ellis Island where my grandparents landed
Today In Krakow, Berlin, New York survivors remember
Immigrants run from oppression
Aim for freedom
Some make it
Others don’t
Who are these displaced people?
Who will receive them?
Who will listen?
Let alone who will welcome them?
What am I supposed to do?
Does anything I do matter?
Exhaustion overwhelms while babies cry
Are you listening God?
Are you there?
Kindly pick up the fucking phone
I am calling you!
So many deaths
of ideas,
hopes,
futile whispers trying to be heard
Come now, my friends,
How bad does it have to get
To wake up compassion
Drugged we walk the streets
Drugged we sit and wait for something unknowable to happen
I read Allan Kaprow’s essays on the blurring of art and life
Can poems and still lives heal us
One artist, one storyteller, one poet at a time
Put their souls on the page, the stage, the canvas
Create a minute,
A breath to a quiet the mind
A space, a place,
to be
present to the heart beat
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