Herstory

By Judy SooHoo

She marks the miracle of life for all

minding the place and moment of first breaths.

Steadfast, she safeguards, and gracefully guides

all paths to our hearts and drives to steep depths

both pride and remorse indelibly etched.

 

She gives voice to each man, woman, and child

accompanying us until our end.

While we look back circumspect, she will hold

dear our intimate truths that will transcend

our living memories ambered in time.

 

Unassuming, she speaks fairly and just

at beck and call standing at the ready.

With vision beyond, all prisms abound

brilliant eyes perceptive, impartial, free

of scrutiny as all would wish it be.

 

Armed with stark facts and stats for us to know

unburied pasts uncover our future.

Hearkened, a canon for liberation

tainted and toyed with by the accuser

implicates as she never erases.

 

Let us not forget our self-inflictions

held prominent in her precious fingers.

Endless earths steeped with spilt free and owned blood

over 200 years of Red Summers,

Mount Miserys, massacres, mob lynchings.

 

Death marches drum and Trails and Highways of

Tears lodge as footnotes in her long shadow.

The flood of faces throughout the ages -

memorials and Orange shirts bestow

honors but do not address the carnage.

 

Singular abominators have lured 

souls amiss to a cancerous frenzy.

More than 35 genocides, she logs

meticulously the names aplenty

and weeps alongside cried pleas of the why.

 

She bears witness to copious crosses

of “The Other” - beige, tan, brown, ebony.

Torn-apart families, through no other

fault, end enshrined, bound in their deathly leave

that sizzle-singe-smoke her full, leaking breasts.

 

Color-blind with virtue for the taking

lighting bare those blind and bloodless to such.  

Salving the pain of the unbearable

on sure hips she carries our weight too much

offering true measure of devotion.

 

No tallying, she asks nothing of us

only to query - What marks your time here?

Societies and civilizations,

mise en scénes, zeitgeists, mores to adhere

leave no legacy of humanity.

 

Many pockets of lone strength she can show

as examples to halt heinous crimes.

Give innocents and true sublimes refuge,

kindle hope, and raise spirits through grim times

grandly bequeathing to all, human rights.

 

Sow from noble roots, not from what seethes from

chilled hearts or deified institutions.

Grasp the greater good, as she in her realm

fulfills her promise of resolution

and magnifies the power from the one.

 

Let us stand on her shoulders of wisdom

and foresight, her lessons to us beckon.

Armed with compassion to quelch the hundreds

of years cultivation of crook’d weapons -

all lies, hate, apathy, and resentment.

 

Or implode and be twice absorbed within

by minority rules who persevere.

Absent her, we will cast empty voices                                       

into the windswept, no echoes to hear

returned, no gifts to bear from her being.