Revolutionary Letter #80 by Diane di Prima
Revolutionary Letter #80
Diane di PrimaGOOD CLEAN FUN
It’s terrorism, isn’t it, when you’re afraid to answer the door for
lack of a Green Card
afraid to look for work, walk into the hospital when yr child
is sick,and what else than terrorism cd you call those smallpox
blankets we gave the Indians
the trail of tears, the raids on Ghost Dancing tribes
It’s terrorism when you’re forbidden to speak yr language
paddled for it, made to run a hundred laps in the snow
in your thin & holey sneakers. What do you call it
when you’re locked in yr high school classroom, armed
policemen
manning the halls? Isn’t it terrorism to force a young woman
to talk to her parents abt her clandestine love
the child she will or will not carry? Is it terrorism
to shoot striking onion workers (1934), pick off AIM members
one by one?
What happened to the Hampton family in Chicago—
Fred Hampton blown away in his bed—
would you call that terrorism? Or the MOVE kids inPhiladelphia
bombed in their home. Or all the stories we don’t know
buried in throats stuffed w/ socks, or pierced w/ bullets.
Wd you call it terrorism, what happened at Wounded Knee
or the Drug Wars picking offthe youth of our cities—as they already picked off
twenty years ago—or terrified into silence—the ones who shd
be leading us now—you know the names.
What was COINTELPRO if not terrorism? What new initials
are they calling it today?
Is Leonard Peltier a victim of terrorism?
Is Mumia Abu-Jamal?Is it terrorism if you are terrified
of the INS, the IRS, the landlord, yr boss, the man
who might do yr job for less?
if you’re scared of yr health insurance
no health insurance
scared of yr street, yr hallway, scared every month
you might not get to the 1st and the next measly check?Is it terrorism to take food from hungry school-kids?
To threaten teenagers who still have hope enough
have joy enough to bring babies into this mess?How has terrorism touched you, shaped your life?
Are you afraid to go out, to walk in yr city, yr suburb, yr
countryside?
To read, to speak yr own language, wear yr tribe’s clothes?
Afraid of the thin-shelled birds w/ twisted necks
poisoned by nitrates, by selenium?
Afraid that the dawn will be silent, the forests grey?Is it terrorism to fill the Dnieper River w/ radiation?
or heat the ionosphere w/ magnetism “to see what will
happen”?
A wonderful weapon, they say, it will perturb
the weather pattern, disrupt communications
Who are the terrorists in the lumber wars?
(the water wars are coming)
And we haven’t even talked about AIDS and cancer.IS THE ASSAULT ON NATIVE INTELLIGENCE & GOOD WILL
THAT WE CALL THE EVENING NEWS
ANYTHING OTHER THAN AN ACT OF TERROR?What was the Gulf War but terrorism
wearing the death mask of order?—one big car bomb it was
the guys who drove it dying now
one by one—ignoredIs acid rain a form of terrorism? (Think for yourself.)
Is GATT or NAFTA anything but a pact among brigands—
the World Bank, the IMF their back-up men?
How long before they fight over the spoils? Who’ll do their
fighting for them?Is Alan Greenspan perhaps the biggest known & named
of our terrorist leaders, here, nurtured here,
trained herethe dark design of whose hearts make
Hutu & Tutsi
Croat & Muslim & Serb
mere diversionary tactics before the onslaught
SELECTED BY YI WEI
I have been returning to this and other poems in Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters to remind me that writing can stand for life without acting in place of living / resisting in the imperial core. Someone once said to me that I should “play the game, but be a moving target.”
I argue that the game is not only rigged but obsolete. The game is a dead thing. When we—living actors against empire—find ourselves in its dead language, how do we turn it on its head by naming the contradictory and state-enacted reality we really live in?
“Revolutionary Letter #80” is a poem about refusal. How do we use language to rename and relocate where our terror is? This poem points my feet when I leave the page.
ABOUT YI WEI
Yi Wei is a first-generation Chinese writer and visual artist unconditionally supportive of Palestinian resistance and liberation. Outside institutional spaces, Yi has organized dozens of community art workshops and gatherings that work across hybrid forms, printmaking, and ecopoetry. Her work has been awarded the Frontier OPEN Prize, the Sappho Prize for Women Poets, the Lois Morrell Poetry Prize, and the Writer in the Public Schools Fellowship at NYU. She can be found at anarchist-run Radix Printing & Publishing Cooperative.
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This poem appeared in Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima, published by City Lights Books, 1971. (Available direct from City Lights Books • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. In 1968, visionary poet Diane di Prima moved from Beat New York to hippie San Francisco to begin these “letters,” poems filled with a blend of utopian imagination, radical politics, and ecological awareness. Immersed in alternative histories and mystical traditions, the poems were catapulted into the world through underground newspapers and free pamphlets, circulating far and wide. In 1971, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the first of four ever-expanding book versions in the Pocket Poets Series. In her last years, di Prima oversaw the final iteration of this lifelong project, adding poems written between 2007 and her death in 2020. This 50th Anniversary edition marks the long-awaited return of Revolutionary Letters to City Lights.” (Source)
ABOUT DIANE DI PRIMA
Diane di Prima was born August 6, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Hunter College High School in New York City, where she began writing. In 1958, di Prima published her first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards (Totem Press). Three years later, di Prima cofounded the New York Poets Theatre and became the coeditor of the mimeograph newsletter The Floating Bear. In 2009, she was named the poet laureate of San Francisco. Di Prima died on October 25, 2020, in San… (more)
Read more poems by Diane di Prima • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 19 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: resistance • oppression • injustice • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
