This is the poem I read tonight at the Pan African Film Festival - My note to poets

1. Do not set out to write the poem that will change the world
The world will be here
Circling the sun
Wishing we treated her like flower

Create the poem that will describe the moment 
From your own tongue and its particular magic lick
Like paintbrush spread baobab trees to surround and protect our Eden

2. Do not guilt me into a revolution
You are afraid to fight yourself
Unball your fists and open your mouths

I have my own stories to set free
Tell me you love me
Even if I am not donned in fatigue
Or red, black and green
Ain't I your woman, too

3. It matters that you open your vaults and let loose your stories to butterfly
Poetry, like love and touch 
Is not a luxury like panty hose or latte
Even if you do not call yourself a poet
Or lover
That thump inside you that beats your guts to grits is poem
And is begging like baby reincarnate to come out
And speak its voodoo verbs
Pleading like a musician's broken fingers
To play and pray

4. We are this now full lipped dark skinned people
New with perfect words we use so eloquently 
And words we rubix cube as code to our brothers and sisters
As our ancestors did with drum
We are the stuttering authentic garble of 
Passed down moans so prickly and hallelujah they cannot be transcribed
But we make do

Our voice is the last whisper of Trayvon Martin and Hadiya Pendleton
The smile of Gabrielle Douglass that leaps and twists our own proud brown faces
This now when our babies are being bullied by classmates
Dying by their own hands or held by police
Traded for sex or shot down by strangers

We hear you Oscar, Amadu, Emmit
And all the names we wrap in sage and kinte

Bread of heaven, bread of heaven
Feed me till I want no more

5. We need your colors across our fences and freeways
To remind us of home, folkways and mores 
In this day of racial tension and privatized prisons
This moment of Christopher Dorner and what is the truth
In our post racial society and stand your ground
Your ribbons are necessary to the now

6. We devalue the simple in the every day
Afraid to cozy up in the cliche of raindrops and bird chirps
Laughter and forgiveness
We spend so much time not sweating the small stuff
We miss the texture only it can create

7. Where is your story about love
About the good in the world
It is all necessary to the orange of the moment
When blue is what we have to read
Every day
Every day somebody's woman done left
Somebody's baby done gone

8. This is our work
Our work that chose us before birth
To paint the why and the when
To be stitches holding life together
To be needles pricking cloth
Connecting our social justice 
Stitch stitch
To our spiritual communities
Pull pull

We are shoelaces 
You and I 
Coming in and out of holes
Twisting, knotting up
Wrapping into pretty bows
Holding on tight
Coming apart
Wrapping up nicely again

This is our work

Bridging our what we know to what you have
The winningest barter ever
This is the job
To poke bleed sew repeat
To hold things together
Like green line and white collar
To make it through the day
With sanity and soup
We all want soup
We are all on this train

Gonna lay down my burdens down by, down by the riverside

9. We are dangerous
When we discover the power of our together
The might of our stories quilted 
Will give cover to our children for generations we cannot count
Our verve is not enough
Our want to requires movement
What with the world so whating our lives away
Our film is not complete without your footage too

10. You will never create if you weigh each moment
Against your mother's death
Your father's cancer
The birth of your son
Your daughter's wedding

This is the thing about creating
To sit in the seat and tell your truth

This is the work

Sew us something we can hold on to
Grow from
Re member
Add soap to and
Wear again

Feed us words we can heal from 
Wrap up in and sop our ugliest tears

Getting it all out is the best revolution we can do for ourselves

We chocolate of many hued people
Let go and make room
For love
To make room
For tomorrow