Today I’ll write about revolution by Natalie Wee
Today I’ll write about revolution
Natalie WeeAfter Noor Hindi’s “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”
They tell us these nations are worth dying for.
Their architectures of cruelty, billion-dollar cop cities displacing the earth’s lungs.
Western media’s an abstruse linguist always getting its feelings hurt.
The law’s an obscene warden of hunger, sure as any anti-homeless bench.
Everything here unmade or unmaking.
These politicians make love only to death.
Caption beneath the Instagram photo of a man burning: Where do we go from here?
They strip-search language for meaning.
Murderers love to say they protect and serve.
Let’s be precise: say free Palestine, free Congo, free Sudan, free—
On a cellphone painstakingly mined by a stranger’s child, I read about Hamzah.
He donated 136 hours to a banner of life so precious, revolutionaries have died for it.
Revolutionaries are always told one small life can’t rewrite economies of death.
Still they have and will take to buses, arms factories, pipelines, & say enough.
Sure as a match.
Sure as the hand that lights it.
If liberation has an address what is its name in every language.
Or the word for safe, or moon, or flowers.
We’ll plant them in the fields & schools & streets.
We’ll carry them in our mouths like our future.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Protean Magazine, 2024.
ABOUT NATALIE WEE
Natalie Wee is a queer creator whose work explores themes of race, gender, queerness, and nationhood, and is deeply informed by grassroots communities. She wrote two poetry collections, Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines (San Press, 2021) and Beast At Every Threshold (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). Born in Singapore to Malaysian parents, Natalie is currently a settler in Tkaronto. (Source)
Read more poems by Natalie Wee • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Follow on Instagram • Twitter • Website • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
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