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Harriet Tubman (artwork)

Letters to America
by Saida Agostini

Two Poems

harriet tubman speaks to
sonya massey

I rebuke you in the name of jesus
  – sonya massey
 

they both sit at sonya’s kitchen table
smoke cigarettes          the smoke
unfolding from the hallows
of their mouths
harriet holds sonya’s hands
sure and steady
sonya speaks quiet
the walls thin and perverse
pitted with bullets
smeared blood the color
of rust               shows
harriet her children
brown and willowy in photos
they talk of everything
summer barbecues and laughter
how god is an unsteady shield
for bullets or bombs
the sun begins to rise
pale and bloodless
the same sky cast over gaza
harriet and sonya pray

 
on july 6th, 2024, sonya massey was shot to death by a police officer in her home, after calling
for assistance regarding a suspected home invasion

 

 

chrystul kizer reads of
harriet tubman in prison

on the worst days she reads of harriet as a child
emptying traps in a frozen marsh
imagines her bare chilled limbs            feels the ache
of icy fingers trawling dark water for the dead
she reads how harriet studied escape like a religion
fluent in the land and sky       could translate
the position of faithless stars into flight
then looks around her cell       a gray bitter
lesson                and remembers her own fleeing
from wisconsin to louisiana     trees
gowned in snow            the press of january’s sulky sun
against her face             the dead white man
who raped her at 16      frozen and gone
her bullet buried forever in his chest
and she is alone at last              facing a thousand miles
of winding exultant road          a child following its mother home

 
chrystul kizur is a young black girl and survivor of sex trafficking, who killed her abuser in self
defense, and was sentenced to eleven years in prison

 

 

    

Saida AgostiniSaida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Diode Poetry Journal, swamp pink, and Poet Lore, amongst others. She is the author of let the dead in, a full-length collection of poems released by Alan Squire Publishingin 2022. She lives online at SaidaAgostini.com.

Header image by Vectorku Studio, courtesy Shutterstock.