Transgender Violence Is a #YesAllWomen Issue | The Nation

Transgender Violence Is a #YesAllWomen Issue | The Nation.

Constance…this is must reading, but even more so…must living.

It must stop.

I do not care if you are male, female, gender fluid, straight, gay, bi, asexual…

I do not care if you are conservative or liberal, christian identified or not…the killing of women in general, and trans-women specifically is literally unacceptable!

By any standard, in any ethical system.

And yet it continues…

Men:  if you do not begin to lead out strong in your groups and spaces, and live out just and humble relationships, then you are as guilty of these crimes as the actual perpetrators…

Women:  if you stay silent, in word and deed, and do not find a way to make it clear to the people you are in relationship with that this way of living is unacceptable, then you are the modern day equivalent of the 1940s Jewish collaborators who sought to avoid persecution by collaborating with their oppressor.

I regret that I did not understand these things years ago…but that is irrelevant, for this is now.

Change must start now.  Right now…for if not, when?

After thousands more have been brutalized and senselessly slaughtered?

Sober and sorrowful,

Charissa

Grace and the Space Between (by Josh Gaines)

This poem is by another friend from my spoken word group…I bought his book, and was reading along until I hit this poem like Thelma and Louise hit that cliff…over the edge I went and into the gulf of wonder regarding how someone could write a poem that was about me, but yet had not met me when the poem was written!

I read it over and over…and over again…and cried…yeah, huge surprise!  Charissa is crying again!  LOL

Seriously, I was soo amazed.  So I wrote to Josh to tell him about how the poem was mine!  🙂  In the process of that, though, I recognized a poem in the email that I had composed, so I pried Prose’s fingers off Poetry’s slender ivory throat, and Deaf Earth’s Denial was the result.

I give you now the genesis poem for that one…

Grace and the Space Between

Grace dreams in the shapes of clouds
Of the spaces between
Here and highways
Willing to wilt in the sun
On the thirsty river roots of cypress
Whose bows, living between her
And her dreams,
Decide to shade her anyway.

Grace dreams in the movement of dust
Climbing the sun that sneaks through curtain-covered windows
Swirling in ghosts
In dreams she twirls with them.
The mattress beneath her smells of second hand
Like salt-water, grass and motor oil.
Some dust settles over her heart
When it sees she has no blankets.

Grace allows form to the formless.
She calls out the names of shapes
Yet to be invented.
She remembers: Between every space
Is the note that binds spaces,

And behind every cloud is the shadow she casts on the sun
Carried up on sun dust song wings
When she sings.
When she sings.

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Use Soft Eyes

When you look from the tops and the corners
of your glance at the walkers thru deserts
of this world full of pain-gilded glories…
Use Soft Eyes.

See, they may be on journeys much longer
than the scope of your heart can consider
bearing burdens of mute tongue-tied stories…
Use Soft Eyes.

Under placid and neutral expressions
that deflect any prying mean fingers
lives eternal unending awareness…
Use Soft Eyes.

Let your countenance radiate kindness
like Niagara gushing relentless
with a laughing voice full of compassion…
Use Soft Eyes.

Travelers talk, and the story
will spread of the human oasis
who generously sees, so determined, to
Use Soft Eyes.

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