Invasive Species Poem

Over the summer while processing and participating in the Black Lives Matter protests and the police and Tr*mp-ian reactions to them, I found in my backyard a vine that had so deeply rooted itself that it had split into several different vines, each the thickness of a baseball bat.

These vines overtook trees that were thriving and had already killed multiple branches off by the time I had realized what was happening. The vine made me consider how things like prejudice and racism invisibly grown in the background of policies rooted in evil and eventually become the institutions themselves.

——

Invasive Species

The genius of the vine 

is patience.

Like colonialism,

or the police,

vines pillage silently

then violently.

Invisibly arriving,

sprouting shoots

tracing the earth,

and anchoring

tendrils to trunks.

What might have begun 

as a neighborly invitation to dinner

becomes a plundering.

The vine equivalent 

of a one-night-stand

that “forgot” to pull out.

Over months 

the guest,

overtakes its host

with order and intention. 

Mingling

in cedar canopies,

borrowing your car 

and returning on E,

leaving you with a pregnancy

you're unable to terminate. 

Those same vines that

once elevated 

your pretentious trellis,

giving you security and pomp,

are now shaking down

once vibrant organisms,

kneeling on carotids

whispering 

“stop talking, 

stop yelling, 

it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen 

to talk.”

Grassroots Leadership - Capturing History: Photographs from the Protest Against Crystal City Internment Camp

Here we are. It’s 2019. We live in a world of finite resources. We live in a country with the highest GDP in the world. We live in a country that projects itself as a Christian nation.

And, despite all of this, our country is tearing breast-feeding children from their mothers, exposing them to illnesses and overcrowding, refusing to allow them to shower or access legal protections, and holding them indefinitely. What is being done to immigrants, asylum seekers, the most-vulnerable amongst us IN OUR NAMES as American Citizens is a national tragedy. It’s a gaping crack in our moral compass. And, it’s a rock that we’re going to have to carry and answer to for generations.

If for whatever reason you’re lacking the empathy to understand why anyone would leave their home and seek a better life, seek protections, seek asylum, perhaps Warsan Shire’s poem, “Home”, could help you. The poem begins:

“no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well”

At the end of March, Tsuru for Solidarity, the ACLU of Texas, Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee, and Grassroots Leadership held a protest event in Dilley, Texas, at one of the concentration camps. The disgusting irony is that it was 20 minutes away from the site of the Crystal City Japenese-American internment camp which were open during and after World War II between 1943 and 1948.

I was lucky to be able to photograph the day’s proceedings for Grassroots Leadership. With my two kids, we were witnessed the remembrance ceremony at the site of the Crystal City camps and then made our way to the hanging of paper cranes outside the Dilley camps. The Remembrance Committee is made up of children that were held in the internment camps. People that were born in the internment camps, or ripped-from their homes to be taken to the camps with just suitcases in tow.

Cranes were sent in from around the country to be hung on the wire fences of the Dilley camp representing the well-wishes of people that couldn’t attend and symbolizing that these people are not forgotten.

Below is a sampling of photos from the day’s events.

It’s mid-August and our national shame continues. I pray nightly that those with the power to stop this nightmare begin to empathize with the plight of someone leaving their homeland… closing the camps… changing policies… and providing a seat at our country’s bountiful table. I pray.