Yoko Ono Lennon
IMAGINE PEACE 2011

18 February 2011

Dear Friends,

Today, February 18th, 2011, I am 78.

I know you are asking many questions on Twitter and elsewhere about what I am really like. It’s something I would love to know, too! One day it will suddenly dawn on us …maybe.

The world situation is too urgent for us now to discuss trivial things, like what I eat for breakfast.

We are at a point in human history when we have to wake up and realize that the only people who can save the world are us.

Every hour that goes by without us doing anything about it affects us, and affects the world that we love so much.

In his State of the Union Speech, President Obama said we should do “big things.” Well, we are already doing the biggest thing anybody in the human history could ever hope for.

Together, we are creating a world of Peace, Love and Freedom, all while the negative forces try their hardest to stop us.

With their power, they want to control the whole world. But we will not let them.

That’s big.

The way we are doing it is by being conscious of the “Power of Togetherness.”

The negative forces do not have that. They are an elitist minority, dipping their heads in arrogant madness.

They always play the same game – using violence, changing laws for their convenience, and seducing us with words to get what they want.

They say if we do things their way, we will all be rich. Well, that’s not happening. It never will. Once there is great wealth, they will want to keep it for themselves.

They also use fear tactics, saying the world will be in a great mess if we don’t do it their way. Well, the world is already in a mess. Why? Because we followed them.

It’s Time for Action. It’s Time for Change.

We, the people of the world, are not dumb. We understand what the “Blue Meanies” are trying to do. We just don’t know how to stop it. And wonder if we can at all.

But we can!

We are doing it.

Take a look at this map. Each dot represents millions and millions of people who are all, right now, thinking of Peace: wishing it, voicing it, and hoping that their dream of peace will become a reality.

Map of global locations of visitors to www.IMAGINEPEACE.com 2010-11 from Revolver Maps

The map expresses what my husband John Lennon and I envisioned. I know he is smiling, thinking of how little time it took for all of us to Come Together.

IMAGINE PEACE is a powerful, universal mantra that we should all meditate on.

With it, we will achieve the impossible. Hopefully, without bloodshed.

Look at all the courageous people who are now being hurt in marches and thrown in prisons for no other reason except for carrying “Peace, Love and Freedom” in their hearts and voicing it.

I don’t want you to get hurt. You shouldn’t have to.

7 billion of us, people of the world, have the birthright to live with a healthy mind and body at all times.

You should not even get one scratch on you, and you won’t, if you don’t allow it.

So keep IMAGINE PEACE in your head.

Have a clear picture of where we stand, what we are doing, and where we want to be.

Know that we are connected in our hearts and minds.

War Is Over, if you want it!

I love you!

Yoko Ono Lennon
18 February 2011

Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer and peace activist who is also known for her work in performance art, music and filmmaking. She is the widow and second wife of singer-songwriter John Lennon.

The HIV Here & Now Project has absolutely no right to post this piece.

Davidson Garrett
Death in Harlem Hospital with Straussian Overtones: 1986

In Memory of Richard Jurgis

No operatic good-bye
the morning you died
of AIDS; only a deep sigh

of grief. I then cried
taxiing home,
a long autumnal ride

past the hidden dome
of the cathedral. My
brain began its comb

for a tidy reply
to white-lie amend
& demystify

death. Couldn’t pretend
with an Elektra-mind—
but did violently rend

all excuses designed
to disguise. Your cold
dead corpse—reclined

in a morgue of mold
alone & battered—
your Queens’ mother I told,

was shattered!

Davidson Garrett is the author of To Tell the Truth I Wanted to be Kitty Carlisle and Other Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2013), Southern Low Protestant Departure: A Funeral Poem (Advent Purple Press, 2015), and King Lear of the Taxi: Musings of a New York City Actor/Taxi Driver (Advent Purple Press in 2006). His poems have appeared in Big City Lit, Marco Polo Arts Mag, The Stillwater Review, Third Wednesday, and Xavier Review, among others, and in the anthologies Pears, Prose and Poetry (Eggplant Press, 2011) and Beyond The Rift: Poets of the Pallisades (The Poet’s Press, 2010). Davidson is an actor and cab driver and lives in New York.

This poem appeared in To Tell the Truth I Wanted to be Kitty Carlisle and Other Poems.

A. R. Ammons
Corsons Inlet

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
rounded a naked headland
and returned

along the inlet shore:

it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,
crisp in the running sand,
some breakthroughs of sun
but after a bit

continuous overcast:

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
of sight:

I allow myself eddies of meaning:
yield to a direction of significance
running
like a stream through the geography of my work:
you can find
in my sayings
swerves of action
like the inlet’s cutting edge:
there are dunes of motion,
organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance
in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:
but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events
I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting
beyond the account:

in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of
primrose
more or less dispersed;
disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows
of dunes,
irregular swamps of reeds,
though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all …
predominantly reeds:

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,
shutting out and shutting in, separating inside
from outside: I have
drawn no lines:
as

manifold events of sand
change the dune’s shape that will not be the same shape
tomorrow,

so I am willing to go along, to accept
the becoming
thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish
no walls:

by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek
to undercreek: but there are no lines, though
change in that transition is clear
as any sharpness: but “sharpness” spread out,
allowed to occur over a wider range
than mental lines can keep:

the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:
black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk
of air
and, earlier, of sun,
waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,
caught always in the event of change:
a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals
and ate
to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab,
picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy
turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits:

risk is full: every living thing in
siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small
white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears
the shallows, darts to shore
to stab—what? I couldn’t
see against the black mudflats—a frightened
fiddler crab?

the news to my left over the dunes and
reeds and bayberry clumps was
fall: thousands of tree swallows
gathering for flight:
an order held
in constant change: a congregation
rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable
as one event,
not chaos: preparations for
flight from winter,
cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps,
beaks
at the bayberries
a perception full of wind, flight, curve,
sound:
the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness:
the “field” of action
with moving, incalculable center:

in the smaller view, order tight with shape:
blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:
snail shell:
pulsations of order
in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,
broken down, transferred through membranes
to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no
lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together
and against, of millions of events: this,
so that I make
no form of
formlessness:

orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override
or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain
the top of a dune,
the swallows
could take flight—some other fields of bayberry
could enter fall
berryless) and there is serenity:

no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,
or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:

terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities
of escape open: no route shut, except in
the sudden loss of all routes:

I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will
not run to that easy victory:
still around the looser, wider forces work:
I will try
to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

Archie Randolph Ammons (1926–2001) was an American poet who won the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1973 and 1993. Ammons’s first poetry collection, Ommateum, with Doxology, was published by Dorrance in 1955. Corsons Inlet, of which today’s selection is the title poem,  was published by Cornell University Press in 1965. A Selected Poems, edited by David Lehman, was published by Library of America in 2006.

This poem appears on Public Domain Poetry, but I have trouble believing it is really in the public domain.

Yolanda Wisher
Dear John Letter to America

America, you beautiful suitor of indigenous bitches. I am a slave ship and you are a skyscraper. I keep the bottom line, you got the upper hand. We try to make love but there’s a war of flesh and steel going on.

Used to woo me with roses carved from melons, douches of Colt 45 and holy water, ivory pearls that turned out to be my grandpa’s wisdom teeth. I must’ve been crazy to keep setting your place at the welcome table, thinking this or that would be the night that you eat from my fork of blues. Said you loved me but you just loved my doggy style. You ejaculated rotted dreams, rusted passion across my chest. In the morning, you left my thighs like crackbrained riverbeds, left the scent of your hunger in my hair.

Ashamed to say I fell in love with you, America. With your swagger and your big talk. Nobody told me your heart was the world’s first digital camera, beating humanity into bloody squares. Nobody told me how you cut mugs from the get-go, the army of hookers you ran with before you lay in my bed, the arsenal of whips and ropes in your closet for the cowboy flicks you produced, directed, and starred in every century.

You keep telling me how you different now, you saved. But you keep making purple moon’s rise on my eyes. Say you sorry but you still find a way to 302 me into oblivion. Build me a dollhouse of steel cages so all my flowers can grow separate and evil. Laugh like a tree grinder when you read my suicide letters. From my soul you make a sharecropper, a little black box.

America, I am the slave ship and do you are the skyscraper. I keep the bottom line, Baby, you got the upper hand. We makin love and there’s a war of flesh and steel goin on. America, you the most sublime, transcendental fornicator. You keep gettin caught with your dick out, tryin to drill a hole in the world. Sometimes I wanna fuck you like there is a tomorrow and a tomorrow and a tomorrow. Sometimes I wanna take your hand, take you to the little markets where the people sell their spirits in small pieces, to the alleyways the hustlers have made soft with hip talk. Walk hand-in-hand along a beach unbought and unbridled, and ride you till you say my name and you change, change. You’d brand me with invisible kisses. I’d be just like those talk show mamas—forgiving. We’d meet every day at the intersection, the bridge, the phone booth, the hot dog stand, and you’d tell me your baby dreams, the ones dense and wet as first forest. Show m your dirty drawls and your secret birthmark. Maybe then, America, I might give myself to you.

Yolanda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro (Hanging Loose Press, 2014) and the co-editor of Peace is a Haiku Song (City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, 2013). Her work has appeared in Fence, GOOD Magazine, Harriet: The Blog, MELUS, Ploughshares, The Sun Ra Mixtape Vol. 1, and in the anthologies Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (U. Michigan Press, 2006), edited by Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, and Camille T. Dungy; Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love (Syracuse University Press, 2010), edited by Stephen Parks; Lavanderia (Sunbelt Publications, 2009), edited by Donna J. Watson, Michelle Sierra, and Lucia Gbaya-Kanga; Stand Our Ground:Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander (FreedomSeed Press, 2013), edited by Ewuare X. Osayande; and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press, 2007), edited by Nikky Finney. As an English teacher at Germantown Friends School, Wisher founded and directed the Germantown Poetry Festival (2006-2010). She also served as the Director of Art Education for the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program (2010-2015). She lives in Philadelphia.

Reprinted from Monk Eats an Afro ©2015 by Yolanda Wisher, by permission of Hanging Loose Press.

George Moses Horton
A Slave’s Reflections the Eve Before His Sale

O, comrades! to-morrow we try,
The fate of an exit unknowing—
Tears trickled from every eye—
’Tis going, ’tis going, ’tis going!

Who shall the dark problem then solve,
An evening of gladness or sorrow,
Thick clouds of emotion evolve,
The sun which awaits us to-morrow,
O! to-morrow! to-morrow!
Thick clouds of emotion evolve,
The sun which awaits us to-morrow.

Soon either with smiles or with tears,
Will the end of our course be completed.
The progress of long fleeting years,
Triumphant or sadly regretted.

In whom shall the vassal confide,
On a passage so treacherous and narrow,
What tongue shall the question decide,
The end which awaits us to-morrow?
O! to-morrow, to-morrow!
What tongue shall the question decide,
The end which awaits us to-morrow?

The sun seems with doubt to look down,
As he rides on his chariot of glory,
A king with a torch and a crown,
But fears to exhibit his story.

What pen the condition makes known,
O! prophet thy light would I borrow,
To steer through the desert alone,
And gaze on the fate of to-morrow;
O! to-morrow, to-morrow!
To steer through the desert alone,
And gaze on the fate of to-morrow.

George Moses Horton (1797–1883) is the author of The Hope of Liberty (1829), The Poetical Works of George M. Horton (1835), The Colored Bard of North-Carolina (1835), and Naked Genius (1865).

Thomas March
Ideal Weight

On viewing Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA)” 1991

Remembrance is no solitary art.
So this is Ross, this multicolored mound
of candies in a heap against the wall,
to serve the curious, who cross the room
where, swindled by the promise of a sweet
distraction, as they kneel to choose a piece
then rise to peel the cellophane away,
they mimic the devotion of a prayer,
dismantling his body absently.

Whoever reads the card can understand
the sad and strange communion they have had.
But from all hands, the empty wrappers fall,
and sounds of crinkling plastic overwhelm
impatient crunches and astonished gasps,
like beetles clearing flesh from silent bone.

It’s what you’d hope the one you love would do
when you have no more spirit left to stand—
collect you in the corner of a room,
to brace the fading traces of your form—
prolong, somehow—unable to forestall
the brief, indifferent sweetness of release.

Thomas March’s recent poetry has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Account, The Common Online, Confrontation, Pleiades, and RHINO. His poetry column, “Appreciations,” appears regularly in Lambda Literary Review and seeks to promote new poetry by offering close readings of poems from recent collections. He is a past winner of the Norma Millay Ellis Fellowship, awarded by the Millay Colony for the Arts, and he has received an Artist Grant from the Vermont Studio Center. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, he has also reviewed for American Book Review, The Believer, and New Letters, among others. Learn and read more at www.thomasmarch.org.

This poem appeared in RHINO.

Georgia Douglas Johnson
Black Woman

Don’t knock at the door, little child,
I cannot let you in,
You know not what a world this is
Of cruelty and sin.
Wait in the still eternity
Until I come to you,
The world is cruel, cruel, child,
I cannot let you in!

Don’t knock at my heart, little one,
I cannot bear the pain
Of turning deaf-ear to your call
Time and time again!
You do not know the monster men
Inhabiting the earth,
Be still, be still, my precious child,
I must not give you birth!

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880 – 1966) was an American poet, one of the earliest African-American female playwrights, and a member of the Harlem Renaissance. She published four volumes of poetry, beginning in 1916 with The Heart of a Woman. Johnson was a key advocate in the anti-lynching movement and a pioneering member of the lynching drama tradition. She was involved in the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaigns of 1936 and 1938 and a member of the Writers League Against Lynching, which advocated for a federal anti-lynching bill and included Countée Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Alain Locke. Her long-running series of Saturday Salons hosted Harlem Renaissance luminaries including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, Richard Bruce Nugent, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké and Eulalie Spence.

This poem is in the public domain.

Paul Lawrence Dunbar
We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was an American poet, novelist, and playwright. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky before the American Civil War, Dunbar began to write stories and verse when still a child and was president of his high school’s literary society. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in a Dayton newspaper. Dunbar was one of the first African-American writers to establish an international reputation. He wrote the lyrics for the musical comedy, In Dahomey (1903), the first all-African-American musical produced on Broadway. Suffering from tuberculosis, Dunbar died at the age of 33.

This poem is in the public domain.

Keith Leonard
Ode to the Grotesque

Predawn cold, and the jet stream of breath
jumps from the snout. The skin’s final form
could be blistered. So say the hands. So says
the bark that half moons the split log.
So says the axe head and sweat lacquered shaft.
A whole cauldron of steam can rise
from the humped shoulders when the body
becomes the blade. One can look villainous,
but what if beauty is the beginning of a terror
we can barely stand? So says Rilke. So say
the Cyclops, the ogre, and the monster
taunted by flame. There was a time
I was afraid of him—this father
carrying wood in his arms like a babe.

Keith Leonard is the author of Ramshackle Ode (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 2016) and the chapbook, Still, the Shore (YesYes Books, 2013). Keith is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Indiana University.

This poem appeared in The Paris-American.

James Weldon Johnson
Prayer at Sunrise

Now thou art risen, and thy day begun.
How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face,
As up thou spring’st to thy diurnal race!
How darkness chases darkness to the west,
As shades of light on light rise radiant from thy crest!
For thee, great source of strength, emblem of might,
In hours of darkest gloom there is no night.
Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight,
And through each break thou sendest down thy light.

O greater Maker of this Thy great sun,
Give me the strength this one day’s race to run,
Fill me with light, fill me with sun-like strength,
Fill me with joy to rob the day its length.
Light from within, light that will outward shine,
Strength to make strong some weaker heart than mine,
Joy to make glad each soul that feels its touch;
Great Father of the sun, I ask this much.

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) is best remembered for his leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). During the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson established his reputation as a writer of poems and novels and an anthologist of black spirituals. During the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, Johnson he served as US consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 1934 he became the first African-American professor to be hired at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University.

This poem is in the public domain.