Margot Pepper

by Margot Pepper

1.
The night of November 4, 2008,
when Barack Obama was declared the first Black man
to receive the key to the White House,
we danced and sang in the street to stars beyond storm clouds.
Drivers honked and cheered each other through open windows;
pedestrians hooted back, slapped palms,
Families spilled out of porches and driveways
and it didn’t take a ballgame.

We could have been in post-apartheid South Africa,
after Mandella was freed and elected president
or in the streets of post-fascist Spain after Franco died.
“It’s like we’ve been released from jail,” I said

by Margot Pepper
Watershed Festival Reading August 18 at noon

I.
They came shackled, scarred, half-drowned on Yemayá’s back:
queen mother of the sea;
children like limbs, severed,
settled by Oshun, the Mississippi river;
clandestine gods and shells stowed behind catholic crosses:
vadu, voodoo, santería.
Where once sweat lodge smoke smudged the view
an auction block now stood.

And so, the great city rose up, multiplied--
cries of birth pains muffled in traffic,
throaty blues and hypnotic jazz,

by Margot "Pimienta" Pepper
Xispas.com 2007

For reprint requests please contact the author via wall@Freedomvoices.org

And what if we interrupted
the phosphorescent faces
that calmly assess our fate?

What if we stripped the presses of
their convenient projections,
voicing instead our own objections
to the national debt and immigrant debate?

We are not the trespassers
who transformed our cobble-stone streets,
adorned by the twice repossessed
temples to our future,
into war zones:

by Margot Pepper
Berkeley Daily Planet, December 27, 2005

Xispas.com 2007

For reprint requests please contact the author via wall@Freedomvoices.org

"How long would authority and private property exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers and hangmen?" --Emma Goldman

Photos arriving on the wire.
American soldiers boarding planes,
dressed for success:

by Margot Pepper
Freedom Voices Publishers
For reprint requests please contact the author via wall@Freedomvoices.org

At this very moment
as anti-Marxists
and anti-anarchists
and anti-revolutionary liberals
debate what's the matter with the places
they've never been to,
a very tall man
a very gaunt man
a very weary man
with greasy hair
and dirty hands
and a pressed cotton shirt
that is as clean
as it could be
has borrowed the ashtray
from my table,
returned it empty
and is proceeding to smoke

by Margot Pepper

For reprint requests please contact the author via wall@Freedomvoices.org