Dedicated to activist, scholar, writer, and FBI’s Most Wanted, Angela Davis

 

I love you because you are

strong.

Breaking segregated solitary confinement to push positive alliance across unblurred color lines. Fighting for Jonathan Jackson who fought for George Jackson, fighting for Black Panthers and Soledad and Prisoners and Critical Resistance and Me.

I love you because you are

fearless.

Marching and picketing as a Girl Scout in Birmingham to prepare for May Day in East Berlin as a Che-Lumumba Scout, instead. Wearing labels of professor and terrorist and radical and lesbian and activist and communist, each as proudly as the other, while fleeing the oppression of home as much as prison.

I love you because you are

beautiful.

Writing the forbidden thoughts of each of us until they become truth that stands on its own when tossed in the streets like trash. Bearing our ancestors’ locks, sashaying through gender inequality and oppression and prison bars and hatred; broken shackles at your quickening feet.

I love you because you are

inspiration.

I love you because you are

endurance.

I love you because you are

resistance.

With fists and ‘fros held high, blacks and gays and terrorists alike, we – through you – become

Strong,

fearless,

beautiful,

inspiring,

enduring resistance.

 

Kai Harris is Rabble Lit’s “Black, I” writer and editor. She is a college English instructor, and a soon-to-be PhD candidate in Fiction at Western Michigan University.

 

 

 

 

RADICAL ROMANCE SUBMISSIONS

Send one poem or short prose piece, to rabble.editor@yahoo.com, with the heading RADICAL ROMANCE: [your title]. We can’t wait to read your submissions! 

 

 

Header Image: Creative Commons, photo by Thierry Ehrmann.