by Raymond Nat Turner
“In our marching shoes, yes, we can
Discover trails less traveled
Connecting us with sage spirits
Sampling James Brown with John
Brown”
If The Shoe Fits...
by Raymond Nat Turner
Shoe leather was once
Voting's egg, blood, its sperm...
Shoe's on the other foot, now
So, to vote, or not to vote
Is not the question---the
Commander even chided and
Derided us: Swap "bedroom
Slippers" for "marching shoes"
In our marching shoes, yes, we can
Click our heels like children
Catching burnt orange and ebony
Butterflies filled with freedom to fly
In our marching shoes, yes, we can
Conjure comets and name them
"Rebellion," "Underground," "Utopian,"
"Civil," "Survival" and celestial bodies coming...
In our marching shoes, yes, we can
Scale the Shangri-la where
Seventy-five year olds march like
Twenty-five year olds and
Twenty-five year olds orate like
Seventy-five year olds,shoulder
To shoulder striking, sitting-in,
Picketing, teaching and taking
Care of one another on filaments
Of shoestring budgets...
In our marching shoes, yes, we can
Discover trails less traveled
Connecting us with sage spirits
Sampling James Brown with John
Brown, disturbing the universe, questioning
Everything about a corrupt, rotten pyramid
Scheme stitched together with tear gas,
Bullets, bombs and LIES...
In our marching shoes, blisters and all,
We're the ones we've been waiting for---
Cast Prada, Nike, Reebok ballots
At bought and bossed footmen!
Raymond Nat Turner can be contacted at Raymond (at) upsurgejazz.com.
(c) 2012 All rights Reserved
You cannot defeat a king with a parade. The failure of "No Kings" is the refusal to build real power beyond a single day of protest.
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Firoze Manji. Manji, a Kenyan with more than 40 years’ experience in…
A false narrative of "Christian genocide" is being weaponized against Nigeria, which is itself victimized by western neo-colonial policies.
The cause of the explosion at Mitchel Houses in the South Bronx harkens back to the arson-for-profit schemes of the 1970s that caused mass destruction of Black and Latine communities. Decades later,…
The A.I. boom is on the verge of bursting like every other capitalist bubble. Financialization and speculation will result in another economic crisis.
