I speak to you of my people- the dispossessed, the powerless the oppressors and the oppressed, the colonizers, the colonized
I tried to express the nuances, and how
We are no monolith, despite the places
We Call Home
How, even in this temporarily "safe" space
Our bodies, our genes remember each diaspora,
Every pogrom
Every displacement and rape
Each edict and genocide
The mass graves and the
Stench of every oven
Tried to explain
Transgenerational inhereted trauma,
The ways each of us carries millions of individual traumas in our cells
These horrors that were
Not our own /Are our own
But to you these things are academic
Things to be analyzed
"Not an excuse"
(I'd never said/say they were)
I said, they are the pain with which we stitch together-
Through Savta, through Saba, through Mother, through Father, through child
This ragged tapestry- this hole filled quilt
Disjointed because we are
Not one people/Are one people
But you cover us all with it, call it a flag
I will not wear a flag
But this ragged tapestry, this
Heavy, hole filled quilt is also mine
And while you can see it, pick apart its threads, critique the spacing of its stitches,
Only we who carry it know its true weight.