“To know a thing isn’t knowing.” This phrase has been tumbling around in my head lately, and led me to write the poem which follows. I’ve been meditating on coming together these days. Not divisiveness, not tearing apart, not othering. Unlike what the popular image may look like, coming together is not a table covered with peace and flowers and happiness. Coming together is not a superficial lie like our History textbook’s illustration of Thanksgiving. It isn’t always pleasant. Coming together is certainly not self-congratulatory or smug that we’ve pulled through and “won the war”. Coming together is not burying the past, but it is daring to really look at it and learn. Coming together is a room in which we must still check ourselves, take responsibility, apologize, invest, grow, and change. Coming together requires curiosity — a courage that few in our current age pledge allegiance to. Curiosity has the power to undo our reactionary ruts. Curiosity doesn’t ask the other to be inherently different. Curiosity’s objective is searching for the individual at this moment in time. Without curiosity I would be much more wounded than I am. Without curiosity my rigidness would win.
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We Don’t Speak of Injustice For Our Words To Be Understood
by Creature/Karin Webb
There is a secret behind the eyes of those who have suffered
Quiet heals into the wounds of survival sometimes
A nod to the interconnectedness of all things
That I have lost, you may gain
Isn’t that the sum total
Of humanity in action
Fortitude from pain
A common willful ignorance from our conquerors, those gifted ones at ease
I catch her distant gaze
Sadness tucked about the eyes
And recognize my own stories
It’s unsettling
I cannot truly know what she keeps locked up inside
Except vaguely, by way of proximity
Familiarity
Reconjuring my own pain
So I listen, in our quiet
For connection
A silent understanding
Teaching me something of her
That might just build a bridge
Which can last
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Play On My Friends,
~ Creature
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