prisons – political prisoner home page – political prisoner listing – Marilyn Buck – Poetry

Marilyn Buck – Poetry

New: Wild Poppies, a poetry jam across prison walls, on audio CD. Poems by Marilyn Buck and other poets, reading Marilyn's poems and their own. Contributors include Amiri Baraka, carolyn baxter/Nottiehead Bosco, Dennis Brutus, Aya De Leon, Fanny Howe, Uchechi Kalu, Elana Levy, Genny Lim, devorah major, Sara Menefee, Kiilu Nyasha, Maria Poblet, Presente!, Carlos Quiles, Samsara, Sonia Sanchez, Staajabu, Jean Stewart, Piri Thomas, Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael, Nellie Wong, Merle Woo, and Mitsuye Yamada.

Marilyn has written poetry for the whole time she has been incarcerated; she has participated in Poetry for the People and other writing workshops in the Federal Correctional Institute (FCI) in Dublin, California. Her poetry can be found in Hauling Up the Morning, Voices of Resistance, Blu Magazine, Sojourner, Prosodia, and other publications. Her collection of poems, Rescue the Word, was published in Spring 2001. She also won poetry prizes from the PEN Prison Writing Program.

Poems:


Black August

Would you hang on a cliff's edge
sword-sharp, slashing fingers
while jackboot screws stomp heels
on peeled-flesh bones
and laugh
       "let go! die, damn you, die!
could you hang on 20 years, 30 years?

20 years, 30 years and more
brave Black brothers buried
in US koncentration kamps
they hang on
Black light shining in torture chambers
       Ruchell, Yogi, Sundiata, Sekou,
       Warren, Chip, Seth, Herman, Jalil,
and more and more they resist:     Black August

Nat Turner insurrection chief executed:     Black August
Jonathan, George dead in battle's light:     Black August
Fred Hampton, Black Panthers, African Brotherhood murdered:     Black August
Kuwasi Balagoon, Nuh Abdul Quyyam captured warriors dead:     Black August
Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ella Baker, Ida B. Wells
Queen Mother Moore - their last breaths drawn fighting death:     Black August

Black August: watchword
for Black liberation for human liberation
sword to sever the shackles

light to lead children of every nation to safety
Black August remembrance
resist the amerikkan nightmare for life

Marilyn Buck 00482-285
anti-imperialist political prisoner
Black August 2000

Two Poems on Peru

I Saw Your Picture Today

 

For Lori Berenson,
Internationalist
Political Prisoner

 

Dear Lori,
I saw your photo in the newspaper
You, posed
between sinister sun-glassed security agents,
two women in double breasted suits
bodies rigid
cruelty pressed upon their lips.
You were labeled the terrorist.

I've seen many photos like that
shot from below
looking up the nose
     nostrils flared
snapped when the lower jaw is dropped
     and the teeth are bared.
Even Miss America
would look fiendish
shot from below.

Photos may be contrivances
one one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth second
of the subject's existence
Reality framed
to depict reality.

Yes, photography is an art
an inception and or deception.
Truth and solidarity
can not be captured
by a single click of the shutter.

February 1996
Published in Syracuse Peace Letters, March 1997

For Fear of Being Called

In Peru a demonstration
against a rise in bread prices
is stopped
because of threats to denounce
those who demand bread
as terrorists.

How greatly we fear language
an electric cattle prod
to drive us into corners
where we cower
for fear of being called
terrorists or communists or criminals.

How did we allow those who don't give
a damn about how we
the 80% live or die
to rob us of our language
to intimidate us into cutting out
our tongues
and binding our limbs into lameness?

How can we be more afraid
to be called terrorists
than to die in the dark
with no one there to speak for us?

February 1996
Published in Syracuse Peace Letters, March 1997, and in Rescue the Word

These two poems on Peru were published in Syracuse Peace Letters (March 1997) and in the anti-fascist e-zine Antifa Information Bulletin (Supplement 103, January 26, 1997). (Note: More on Lori Berenson can be found at freelori.org).

 

Marilyn's home page, her Wild Poppies poetry CD, more writings on prison control units, on "Legal Issues for Women in Federal Prison", "On the Burning of African-American Churches".

prisons – political prisoner home page – political prisoner listing – Marilyn Buck – Poetry

This page is maintained by the Prison Activist Resource Center.  

April 2, 2005