Poem Transcripts from the 12th Annual Poetry Invitational

Untitled Inspired by Sharon Daniel’s Undoing Time/PLEDGE By: Rhy Mack, Notre Dame High School (Senior)

I pledge allegiance to the flag of a country that locks up its problems Black problems, brown problems, sick problems, addicted problems, uneducated problems Instead of rehabilitating those in need of assistance, they’re confined to a cell for 23 hours of the day, isolated from the help they desperately need of the united states of America A country built by the ancestors of these problems, built upon their backs and with their bones, their skin, their hair, their teeth, their lives, and their dreams A country that values the comfort of the oppressors over the humanity of the oppressed A country that long-ago criminalized blackness, brownness, divergence All three crimes punishable by death And to the republic for which it stands It stands for law and order but bends rules to justify convictions It stands for freedom, if you have a good enough lawyer and the money to bail yourself out For a country that proudly boasts the abolition of slavery as the accomplishment it is, the US has a tendency to use such a deed to put down the descendants of the enslaved If you’re so proud of it and did it out of the kindness of your heart, then why do you feel the need to hold it over our heads?

Why do you feel the need to remind us of how thankful we should be?

Frankly, slavery never really ended It evolved One nation The thirteenth amendment states in full that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”, and that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Notice that there is an exception made for individuals being enslaved as punishment for a crime Are those who have committed criminal offenses less worthy of freedom?

Are they less than human?

They must be, right? Why else lock them up like animals?!

Under G-d Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads and biblically defended their barbaric practice The slave catchers became the police The enslaved became prisoners No wonder we have such a high rate of recidivism, America is so obsessed with the idea of locking up criminals that it doesn’t stop to realize the toll such actions have on families

We don’t rehabilitate, we dehumanize We don’t correct, we subject them to cruelty and inhumane treatment as a way of teaching them that breaking the law is wrong Indivisible But why would they get better if we keep locking them up, Make it legal to keep them from jobs and housing Make it impossible for them to survive on the outside A bus pass and their clothes are not enough for them to get by Some have family, friends, loved ones to support them but what about the others?

They end up within those four walls again not just out of the punishment for their crime but also out of a need for stability We are divided on how to mend these wrongs but the truth is, we can’t, not soon enough to make up for what we’ve taken from them With liberty and justice for all All? George Floyd?

Herman Wallace?

Ahmad Arbery?

Breonna Taylor?

Trayvon Martin?

Michael Brown?

Sandra Bland?

You lied to me, America With liberty and justice for those who can afford it With liberty and justice for those deemed worthy of it based not on their crime but their skin color With liberty and justice for those who look like you, act like you, talk like you With liberty and justice for those who don’t runWait, Breonna wasn’t running.

With liberty and justice for those who don’t fight Wait, George wasn’t fighting With liberty and justice for those who don’t break the lawIt shouldn’t matter what crime is committed Police officers are not judge, jury, and executioner And judge and jury have an obligation to look at cases from all sides.

Maybe a new pledge is in order I’m not qualified to write one but if I had to, I wouldn’t deify my place of origin or insist that it always strived for justice Instead, we all have a duty to call out the injustice in policing, criminal justice, and the prison system Before the point of the original pledge is lost forever.

They’ve Got The Inspired by Hank Willis Thomas’s If The Leader Only Knew By: Janice Lobo Sapigao, Santa Clara County Poet Laureate 2021

What world are you holding onto?

My world is brimstone, thorn, brick and brass. Bronze & still breaking, you only never let go when you haven’t been shown new ways to hold. You only hold the lines people cross so as to take them apart.

Your hands only stay fists because you are always in the throes of a fight for a future with you in it.

You only hold the line when everything else has been taken from you. Here is the thing about hands. They multiply like leaves of ivy.

They wrap metal and climb out of roots making homes out of walls. When ivy vines inside walls, the walls break. Again, what world are you holding onto?

Activists put their bodies on frontlines to emphasize the weight of their political power Have you ever felt the flesh of hours in hunger strikes? In sit-ins? In boycotts?

Resistance is in our music, our speeches, our names, our poems, our bones. Each lyric a line of protest.

Against children in cages & concentration camps.

Against voter suppression. Against mass incarceration.

In any time America uses cities as gun ranges against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.

When police pile water & rubber bullets

against legs to take out the hands. We won’t forget that it takes pointer fingers & palms & laws to place people in binds.

This old world is broken by design.

It is barbed wire & white & bloodshed.

It is horizontal monuments & shrapnel.

A rally is not a group of lines, it is a lineage.

When you see us, don’t think about what limited world we are upholding. Imagine what world we will build when we dismantle this one.

To the morning we don't want to know Inspired by William T Wiley’s Vetka and The Harvest, By: Sophia Kamra, Fremont High School (Sophomore)

To the morning we don't want to know, Born of every misstep we have ever made The haunts of history's every mistake, Is today or tomorrow or a blur Born of curses to curses ashes to ashes, Dust to dust , Life to death to life Born of the hunt, And in this never ending rut we find we are more bone then breath More city then sea More body then blood My generations humor is nihilism Our comedy the temptation of oblivion Because isn't that all that we want these days A moment without fear, Because we where raised on omens For a future that was supposed to be our own Torn from our hands Born from the greed of the past, Born of the hunt

We hear beatings in the streets As the Silenced are fighting, A fight we can never begin to understand we stand Against a future we wouldn’t want to unfold, Again Because forward is ten steps back, We’ve got a blue power But that doesn’t mean we have a new hour, We still have hate Like when ships sailed searching for those to enslave,

The west ever often starved for empathy, As we built towns, to cities, to empires, As the industrial age beckoned the bones of our future To the bones we drill for more, Oil wells and gold ore I think we hunt to well And in this new age, Born of rage Of injustice , Because what good is the hunt when it ends in cages, What good is the hunt when it leads to the tomorrow we don't want to reach, Because the morning we don’t want to know, Is the children's future, So make this the morning we want to stay.