The Wrong Clothes

In response to this outrage of a news story:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/07/29/sudan.journalist.lashings/index.html

I have worn the wrong clothes
My jeans are tight and my blouse is low
And in the wrong village where all soon will know
The lashes awaiting me there

I have the same long black hair
It is curled in a bun in my hijab
I am sorry for flesh that is soon to be burning
For I have worn the wrong clothes

These men with the knives in their eyes
And the blood on their hands are still laughing
They hold holy books but all that they know
Is that I have worn the wrong clothes

This World Now

That world I saw when I was young
Was never meant to last
Infinities of time and space
Not true as time burns past

That world of kings and princesses
And castles midst the mead
Was home to all my truant days
The place my soul would feed

That world with doves and daffodils
Emblazoned in my mind
While all around me life devolved
Into a frenzied kind

This world pounces on its victims
This world lays its souls to waste
This world spends its time in shadows
This world has no couth or taste

This world preys on every addict
This world masquerades as sweet
This world leaves the righteous homeless
This world starves you in the street

This world racketeers and rapes
This world charges by the dream
This world ambushes the children
This world is too cold to redeem

Her There

As the sun streaks
Through unrepentant windows
One morning following storm

You will see fog’s reminders
Chiffon dress, carpet’s imprint
Footprints in well past bedroom’s door

Wineglass by the bedside
With wide vanilla mouth
Her shadow, her hair

Her station in stereo
Her music exhaled
Her dreams dancing over the air

Her name in the curtains
Her pain on bent elbow
Her feeling dispersed everywhere

You feel every atom that makes up her dew
But you will not see
Her there

The Shape of Time

When I was a child
Time was a ramp
To accelerate into
The infinite sky

Now I am old
And I see it an arc
Not a colorful rainbow
But a curved aberration
Arcing itself down until I

Bye, Bye Michael

Like many, I was cynical about today’s memorial service for Michael Jackson. I thought for sure that this would be way over the top, that they were deifying this troubled man and making a mass media spectacle in a slower-than-average summer news week.

Yet after watching this unfold on CNN, just like the tens of thousands of fans who didn’t pull up that lucky email, I must say that the memorial was a moving and poignant event, tastefully produced and heartrendingly delivered.

This memorial service gave an accurate, unwavering picture of who Michael Jackson was not only in American culture but on the world stage. It is important to understand that this man’s performing career lasted an incredible 38 years—longer than Elvis and more than four times that of the Beatles.

One of my own very first albums was a Jackson 5 record. Ironically, I don’t think I remembered this until I watched the memorial. How I loved the voice even then, like sugar, that sweet.

In a sense, part of me died when Michael died. My brothers and I loved this music—affluent white kids listening to music from a black family from the poor outskirts of Chicago. There was no way to listen to it and not be touched. His voice gave a sense of immediacy and warmth right there in that room with you, wherever you were. And as I grew, Michael was there in the soundtrack, in the dance numbers, the ballads, the videos, the sensual moves, the soaring voice, the seductive call, the plaintive whisper. Not only with his dynamic presence, but in the way he told kids everywhere that it’s OK to be sensitive, to be vulnerable, to be multisided, to be black, to be gay, to be androgynous, to be human. And what a tragic and paradoxical figure he became. Yet nothing that happened to Michael in his later years could diminish that feeling of humanness he always evoked.

So watching performers and celebrities, civil rights leaders and talking heads, preachers and pastors from around the world come out and literally sing his praises, I suddenly realized this was right. This was the right action for a man who did so much right and so much good in the world.

The world saw and heard his children for the first time. It was impossible to listen to that pretty little girl speak about losing her daddy and not feel tears well up inside. Having lost my own father suddenly at the age of 12, I know that pain. I know that pain.

I’m glad that I got this chance to feel a farewell to Michael. I know that now, more than ever, our collective innocence is gone. A light went out on earth. But if indeed there is a heaven, a star is shining there forever.