Water no get enemy (03/26)

 

@soybaco

Poem for the writer Dorothy Bell Ferrer 

Body of resistance.

We surrendered too soon,

but history never surrenders.

Truth never gives up. 

In the afrofuturism of your lips, your voice

a student strike,

cries that break the night,

songs of Pan-Africanism in forgotten corners.

There I saw you.

Colorism of memory,

double consciousness pulsing in your skin.

I wanted to be the last slave,

but Jane Doe & Jim Crow

still dance in the shadows.

Hurricane María took more than rooftops,

it took memory,

the echo of grandmothers who spoke of corporeality,

of flesh that remembers,

of racialized bodies the wind cannot erase.

That earthquake’s dawn

was the awakening of a people,

the sound of the earth refusing oblivion.

Cabo Rojo and the dinner that never was,

blame racial capitalism,

colonial hunger,

the debt that hangs 

like a rope 

around the neck of the Global South.

I am a diaspora in silence,

but my verses scream.

I confess that in memory

live the feelings of the letters I wrote in a napkin

while you typed on your laptop at Libros AC. Oh! San Mateo de Cangrejos!

There, between coffee and paper,

we discovered the materiality of resistance,

poetry as reparation,

words as abolition.

We surrendered too soon,

but history never surrenders.

And in the ink of this poem,

we become water 

and water 

no get enemy.

-ER

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