One Love

Outside the morning air
is warm
and humid
a solitary seagull glides
dives
then rises again
against
a canvass of over cast sky
I have made your bed after sleeping in it with you
And though you are gone
I feel you
still here
Is this ancient or new
what I have discovered in you?
I want to fall and end in flight
I am the seagull
No, that's not right
Your familiarity is exciting
and this excitement is familiar
we may destroy ourselves
in the fall but I say, jump
anyway
for fear is the beginning of death
and this life is for living, afterall

After all these years of playing Icarus
with wax & borrowed feathers & too close to the sun
I will take my lesson from the seagull
whose wings are his own
and whose fight is not a quest
but a question, a mystery:
Beauty in Survival;
Celebration of Life

Copyright 2004

Translation of life (Somewhere, a hummingbird)
My earliest memories are of rain
The life giving force of creation
Pouring love out of the sky
The river would swell brown
And two little brown girls would find mirth in the bubbling pools

This is how my life began:
Wet, green and innocent
Full of familar
Hide and seek in the wild bananas
The heady perfume of rain lilies and night blooming Jasmine
And god’s low murmur rolling in from the edges of the world
Thunder was our lullaby

Baptized in the laughing waters of earth’s compassion
I emerged from the cloud forest
With the scent of rebellion in my skin
And only love in my heart

You look at me now
Walking with a hurried pace
Through your hallowed halls
Through your world of white noise,
broken promises and secret handshakes
My arms appear full
But really they are empty
Really they are reaching
Reaching for the ladder that you are pulling up
From under me
Really
They are reaching
For the truth

You can take your Locke and Kant
And liberal ideals
Your rhetoric of equality
And television heroes

I have read your theories
And justified your justifications
I have been bled by your cultural leaches
And numbed by the sugary taste of consumption

I have survived in your world
Even though its whole purpose is to tear me apart
Again
And again
And again

I have translated my life
Into your thick and carnivorous tongue

I have survived
With my sense
Of justice
Intact

But what have you done
To know who I am?
Do you assume I am like you
Just because I seem to fit in?

I take comfort
In knowing
That you are faint of heart
That you are more cowardly than you think
Because bravery does not come from the exercise of privilege

Rather, it comes from humility

I take comfort in knowing
That you do not care to know
Who I am
How I got here
Because it leaves me with something
Maybe the only thing
In this world
That I know
Is really mine

Something that I do not have to translate
Something wet, green and familiar

Somewhere, a hummingbird
Seeks sustenance in the succulent purple blossom of a wild banana
Clouds gather on the edges of the world
And god hums along


Copyright Sarah Jane Forman 2004

Last night I saw the film "Hotel Rwanda" which recounts the true story of a hotel manager during the 1994 civil war in Rwanda that resulted in the death of 800,000 people in 100 days (that is one tenth of Rwanda's entire population) . Everyone should see this movie. The acting is very good and the story is tragic and compelling. It is sad that after so many years of human evolution, we still turn on one another like savages over diffferences that are irrelevant. But perhaps the greatest misfourtune is the way white people from the indistrialized 'global north' refused to intervene to save the lives of Africans. Some people may think that colonization is over, that salvery is a thing of the past but situations like this make it all to clear that old attitudes die hard and that 800,000 black lives are not even worth one white life.

It has been ten years since the world sat by and watched genocide devastate Rwanda, now we are sitting by again as it happens in the Sudan. People, we can do better.


For more information about Rwanda visit:
http://allafrica.com/rwanda/ or http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/rw.html

To see BBC coverage of the Rwanda Genocide visit:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/africa/2004/rwanda/default.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3594187.stm
To See the Frontline's coverage visit: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/

For information about the ongoing genocide in Sudan visit:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3991759.stm
For more about the current slave trade in Sudan visit: http://www.lnsart.com/Sudan%20Slave%20Story.htm