Binding My Brothers and Sisters... So It Will Get Better by Sonia Sanchez

    How can I bind you together my brothers and sisters?

    How can I bind your old wounds so that they stay dormant till the newer surgical methods come about?

    How can I bind you together my brothers and sisters? Away from Racism.

    Sexism. Homophobia. Exploitation. Militarism. Extreme materialism. Towards Unity.

    With varying shades of color moving the world in tune to sanity.

    Love for self and others.

    Respect for self and others.

    Ambition without exploitation.

    How can I weave you into a rainbow symmetry, letting your brown, yellow, white and Black/laughter sprinkle our lives with non-destructive tints?

    How can I bind you Asians, Latinos, Whites, Africans, African Americans, Native Americans, Jews, Chicanos, Muslims, Lesbians, Gays, to a future world?

    Away from an Orwellian image of the future.

    Of a boot smashing a human face forever?

    How can I bind you to responsibility in a non-responsive world?

    How can I bind you to yourselves so that you know that the human face will triumph over the boot forever?

    Perhaps through telling you that if we drop our twin seasons of privilege and inferiority, we will see a world free of myths and social ills. If we act in the interest of humanity - - if we help improve life for our sisters and brothers in our country and the world, then we will truly be human beings.

    Standing upright in a world that is fed by passions of greed and envy and jealousy and hatred.

    You are an important generation to us my brothers. My sisters.

    You have come to us through centuries of man’s/woman’s inhumanity to man/woman.

    Listen to Tolstoy

    There are men who say

    i sit on a

    man’s back

    choking him

    and making him

    carry

    me and yet 

    I assure myself

    and others

    that I am sorry

    for him

    and wish

    to lighten his load

    by all means

    except getting off his back.

    You are important to us because this earth can no longer hold those people who choke us, or who are choked.

    We need you my brothers and sisters to learn, to build, to lead, to educate.

    But in a way that your eyes take on different landscapes and become more human.

    For if we lose you to Saturday afternoon murders, extreme materialism, drugs, alcohol, selfishness.

    If we lose you to wars, pollution, red, white & blue rhetoric then we are finished.

    And I for one shall not give you up to a life just 3 cars, 2 ½ children and 4 martinis before dinner.

    You didn’t ask to be born at this point… at this time. But you are here. Looking at the 21st Century.

    And you must look it squarely in the eye so that there will be a 22^nd Century.

    Your fate is to be blessed and burdened with knowledge that no other generation has known, or tasted.

    You will walk with the technology that stuns the mind.

    You will walk with a history of Africans jumping, screaming in an ocean in protest to that obscenity called slavery in the Americas.

    You will walk with a history of Native Americans defending their country against invaders, walking their blue death walk of relocation.

    You will walk the history of Jews and others dying in concentration camps, their children moving in the rain of ash unraveling minds.

    You will walk with the Japanese in Hiroshima, where open flesh was replaced by commemorative crusts.

    You will walk with madmen goose-stepping in tune to Guernica, You will walk with Africans slaughtering 200,000 in 4 months in Rwanda.

    You will walk with the slaughter and rapes in Bosnia, the many massacres of the spirit and body.

    You will walk with drugs in Suburbia, North Philadelphia, South Philadelphia, Ambler, Bronx, Beverly Hills, Park Avenue.

    Yeah, yeah, yeah, here she/he is, step right up, step right up, step right up, a good sale on girls and boys today. Now give me my crack-crack-crack-crack, crackinnng my mind-mind-mindddd.

    We must finally say: I hear your daughter’s laughter in the wind; I see your son riding on the morning waves; they are in our eyes and we will never let these intoxicating ideas of race superiority, economic superiority, social superiority, sexual superiority, terrify the earth until it swallows itself whole. Again.

    Your fate today as you begin your walk toward abundance is to say I remember. I shall always wear a memory on my forehead.  I shall never forget the earth.   The sea.  The people.

    Love for peace, justice and truth.

    I shall always be arriving as I am today, a ceremony of thunder, waking up the earth. And if you do. If we do. Then we know it’ll get better on earth.

    If we work for peace and racial and sexual and social justice and equality, it’ll get better. In the Twi {language of the Akan peoples of Ghana and Cote' d' Ivoire} words EBE YIYE!…it’ll get better for you and me. The world, we’ll make it better in our time so that we’ll have more time.

    So I say to you new generation of taffera day dropping blue white sapphires.

    Inaugurate across the sound of your words.

    not symbols and serums,
    not peepholes and posturing,
    not lesions and lechery.

    Inaugurate a new day.   A new deal.  A time for all humanity.

    Inaugurate like new men and women should, coming out of themselves and towards peace and justice. So come with yourselves, singing life, singing eyes, singing hands, 

    alarming the death singers, that you have come to celebrate life,

    until we become seeing men and women again.

    Inaugurate a new way of breathing for the world.

    A new way of breathing for the world

    and it will get better.

    EYE YIYE! EYE YIYE! EYE YIYE!*

    *It’ll get better!

Sonia Sanchez is a noted poet, social activist, professor and supporter of the Black Arts Movement who has authored over 16 books. She's the Poetry Society of America's 2001 Robert Frost Medalist and previously held the Laura Carnell Chair in English at Temple University.