Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe in a War Between Races

by Lorna Dee Cervantes

In my land there are no distinctions.   The barbed wire politics of oppression   have been torn down long ago. The only reminder   of past battles, lost or won, is a slight   rutting in the fertile fields.

In my land   people write poems about love,   full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.   Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps.   There are no boundaries.   There is no hunger, no   complicated famine or greed.

I am not a revolutionary.   I don’t even like political poems.   Do you think I can believe in a war between races?   I can deny it. I can forget about it   when I’m safe,   living on my own continent of harmony   and home, but I am not   there.

I believe in revolution   because everywhere the crosses are burning,   sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,   there are snipers in the schools…   (I know you don’t believe this.   You think this is nothing   but faddish exaggeration. But they   are not shooting at you.)

I’m marked by the color of my skin.   The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly.   They are aiming at my children.   These are facts.   Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my   “excuse me” tongue, and this   nagging preoccupation   with the feeling of not being good enough.

These bullets bury deeper than logic.   Racism is not intellectual.   I can not reason these scars away.

Outside my door   there is a real enemy   who hates me.

I am a poet   who yearns to dance on rooftops,   to whisper delicate lines about joy   and the blessings of human understanding.   I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and   bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn’t fade out   the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage.   My own days bring me slaps on the face.   Every day I am deluged with reminders   that this is not   my land

and this is my land.

I do not believe in the war between races

but in this country   there is war.