AMY GOODMAN: Well, it looks like actor Danny Glover has become one of the latest victims of the war on free speech, after he publicly criticized the use of military tribunals. On November 16th, at the invitation of the local Amnesty International chapter, Danny Glover gave a speech about the death penalty to a packed auditorium at Princeton University. While the speech was enthusiastically received at first, it became the subject of controversy when, following the lecture, a young person asked the actor whether he would extend his opposition to the death penalty to Osama bin Laden. Glover affirmed his opposition to the death penalty in all circumstances. The provocative exchange continued with Danny Glover noting that America has been a key purveyor of violence in the world. Danny Glover also voiced his objections to military tribunals that President Bush has created.

These comments have elicited a hailstorm of outrage from some. For two weeks, The Trentonian newspaper ran angry comments suggesting that if Danny Glover didn’t love this country, he should leave it. Meanwhile, Oliver North broadcast the story across the country on his Radio America show, urging his audience to boycott The Royal Tenenbaums, a movie that was released last Friday in which Danny Glover stars alongside other prominent actors. More recently, in Modesto, California, the controversy caused the City Council there to withdraw its sponsorship of Danny Glover as the featured speaker for the celebration of Martin Luther King Day.

Well, today we’re going to go to a performance of Danny Glover as he read a speech of Dr. Martin Luther King. It was at an event at the New York Society for Ethical Culture called “Mother Courage: Imagining Peace,” and it was in support of the women and children of Afghanistan, an event sponsored by MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization, and it took place on December 10th.

After all of this news came out about Danny Glover, we thought, “What better time to run Danny Glover reading the speech of Martin Luther King?” And in addition, for this hour, we will hear from many others as they participate in this event called “Imagining Peace,” people like Eve Ensler, Sonia Sanchez, Susan Sarandon. So take a listen, as we begin with Danny Glover.

DANNY GLOVER: “A Time to Break the Silence,” Martin Luther King Jr., April 4th, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.

“’A time comes when silence is betrayal.’ That time has come for us in relationship to Vietnam. The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty, but we must move on.

“Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate in our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice, as well. …

“There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago, there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both Black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor. …

“Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions to the rest of the population. We were taking Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia or East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on television screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. …

“Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. … I speak for those whose land has been laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. …

“We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.”

AMY GOODMAN: That was Danny Glover reading the speech given by Martin Luther King Jr. at Riverside Church, April 4th, 1967. Now to Susan Sarandon reading “How We Did It” by Muriel Rukeyser at an event sponsored by MADRE in support of women and children of Afghanistan called “Mother Courage: Imagining Peace.”

SUSAN SARANDON: “How We Did It” by Muriel Rukeyser.

We all traveled into that big room,
some from very far away
we smiled at some we knew
we did not as we talked agree
our hearts went fast thinking of morning
when we would walk along the path.
We spoke. Late night. We disagreed.
We knew that we would climb the Senate steps.
We knew we would present our claim
we would demand : to be strong now : end the war.
How would we do it? What would we ask?
“We will be warned,” one said. “They will warn us and take us away.”
“We can speak and walk away.”
“We can lie down as if in mourning.”
“We can lie down as a way of speech,
speaking of all the dead in Asia.”
Then Eqbal said, “We are not at this moment
a revolutionary group, we are
a group of dissenters. Lets some, then,
walk away, let some stand until they want to leave,
let some lie down and let some be arrested. Some of us.
Let each do what he feels at that moment
tomorrow.” Eqbal’s dark face.
The doctor spoke, of friendships made in jail.
We looked into each other’s eyes
and went all to our rooms, to sleep,
waiting for morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Susan Sarandon reading Muriel Rukeyser’s “How We Did It.” Now to Monica Aleman.

MONICA ALEMAN: I am the Palestinian women
the Israeli women
we are cousins
how do I imagine
memory
holding history
too harsh to taste
how do I speak my language
invent a new one
each syllable a volcano
reconfiguring the Earth
each syllable
the recovery
a pass
if I say what I know
will you still listen
and can I still live in my body then
how do I imagine my two hearts
one belly
voice of blood
a just geography
in this room
this year
start here
home
college
name
city
earth
language
coffee
wine
water
school
work
travel
no passport
ID card
imagine
we can acknowledge
this past
a moment without fare
I know I cannot say everything here
no woman can
my wide hips carry sticks for fire
turn villages
secrets
poems
my children’s dream
wrapped in this anxious skirt
all things are not the same
that’s all I can say today
in this room
but I am here
to imagine.

AMY GOODMAN: And that was Monica Aleman. When we come back from break, Eve Ensler on “I Have Been Thinking About Violence,” Tony Kushner from Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht, and Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon read from Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez’s letter, that didn’t get published in the newspaper but went around the internet. Their son, Greg Ernesto, died above the 100th floor of the World Trade Center, and they pleaded with President Bush, “Not in our son’s name. Not in our name. Don’t bomb Afghanistan.” You’re listening to The War and Peace Report. These cultural workers and artists gathered for a MADRE event to benefit the women and children of Afghanistan. MADRE online is MADRE.org, and you can get all contacts at our website, democracynow.org. We’ll go back to “Imagining Peace” in just a minute, here on The War and Peace Report.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “On Children,” Sweet Honey in the Rock, Kahlil Gibran’s poetry in music. You’re listening to The War and Peace Report, as we go back to “Mother Courage: Imagining Peace,” an event that was sponsored by MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization in support of the women and children of Afghanistan. The event included Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Sonia Sanchez and others. We begin with Eve Ensler. She wrote this piece and performed it, “I Have Been Thinking About Violence.”

EVE ENSLER: I have been thinking about violence. I have been thinking about an airplane full of terrified women and men and children smashing into a tower full of unsuspecting women and men who were just sipping their morning coffee. I have been thinking about the burning people jumping from the 100th floor, jumping for their lives. I have been thinking about the hundreds of firemen and policemen who were lost, crushed under a collapsing tower. I have been thinking about a husband waiting in his office for 14 hours for his wife who worked on the 104th floor, who had not called, who was probably never going to call, and yet he was still waiting. I was thinking of the man who called his mother from the hijacked plane to tell her he loved her, to remember he loved her. I have been thinking about the debris and the dust on New Yorkers’ shoes and how shocked we are here in America, how protected we have been. I have been thinking about all the war-torn countries I have been to, Bosnia, Kosova, Afghanistan, and the dust on the peoples’ shoes and the debris. I have been thinking about the people who were driven to hijack airplanes with knives and box cutters, who were driven to hijack airplanes, who were ready, eager to lose their lives to hurt other people. I have been thinking about violence, what it feels like to be nothing to someone else. What it feels like to be a consequence of someone else’s disassociated rage, disconnected fury. I have been thinking about the cycle of hurt for hurt, nation against nation, tit for tat. I have been thinking about the courage it requires to think about something else.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Eve Ensler. Now to playwright —

EVE ENSLER: I have been thinking about the courage it requires to think about something other than violence as a response to violence. I am thinking about the complexity of this and the loneliness of this and the helplessness and the sorrow that would be felt in the space where violence once was and the grief. I have been thinking that for those of us who are living on the planet right here, right now, nothing less will do if we want to go on as a species, that we must live in this dangerous space, allowing the helplessness, the grief, the sorrow to create new wisdom that can and will and must free us from this terrible world of violence. I urge you, each one of you — fall into this space, weep, be lost, let go, die into the grief — on the side it will be revealed.

AMY GOODMAN: Now to playwright Tony Kushner, from Eve Ensler reading her piece, “I Have Been Thinking About Violence.”

TONY KUSHNER: This is the opening scene, just two speeches from the opening scene of Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht. As professor Eric Bentley points out in a famous essay on the play, the first audience to hear these speeches in a theater was an audience in Berlin in 1946. It’s two soldiers, a recruiting officer and a sergeant, who are standing near a town.

And the recruiting officer is complaining, “How’s a soldier supposed to gather recruits in a place like this? I’m thinking of killing myself, Sergeant. Order comes from the General Staff, four fresh companies in two weeks’ time! And the people here are so rude. They’re vicious. I’ve got insomnia. Imagine, if you will, some jerk, concave chest, varicose veins. I overlook all that. I buy him beers 'til he's shitfaced. He signs up. And then I’m paying the tab at the bar. He’s off to take a leak, he says. I keep an eye on him because I’ve learned the smell of a rat. And sure enough, zzzzzzzip! Out the door like a silverfish when the lamp’s lit. Honor, loyalty, duty, God — forget it. A place like this makes you lose your belief in the inner goodness of man, Sergeant.”

The sergeant responds, “The problem is these people have gone too long without a war. So of course they’re sleazy. No war, no decency, ethics, morality. Peacetime, everything gets rotten. War purifies and organizes. Peace comes, people become rutting animals, screwing one another, screwing the livestock. Nobody gives a damn. Everybody gets fat in peacetime. 'Oh, I think I'll just sit down now and eat a big cheese and fat sandwich on a slice of fresh white bread.’ Do you think those people there know how many young men and horses they’ve got in that town? It’s peace! Why count? I’ve been in some towns so godforsaken they’ve even had 70 years without war. The people haven’t even bothered naming their children. Nobody knows whose was whose. You need a good stiff war to get people counting and listing and naming: shoes in nice big piles, corn in bags for carrying off, each man and each cow tagged and inventoried. War makes order, and order makes war.

And the recruiting sergeant says, “Here, here.”

The sergeant finishes up, “Sure, it’s tough work starting a war. Anything worthwhile is tough. But once you get a war on its feet, blam! It runs away from you. Sloppy, lazy, peaceful people turn into savages. They throttle, rape and mutilate peace like they were afraid if they stopped, they’d have to think about how much blood there is. It’s invigorating. It’s an invigorating change from the ordinary. It’s exciting, war is. These people need a good war.”

AMY GOODMAN: Tony Kushner, playwright, reading from Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht. Now to Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon reading the letter to President Bush from Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez, who lost their son, Greg Ernesto Rodriguez, in the World Trade Center.

DANNY GLOVER: “Dear President Bush: Our son is one of the victims of Tuesday’s attack on the World Trade Center. We read about your response in the last few days and about the resolutions from both Houses, giving you undefined power to respond to the terror attacks.

SUSAN SARANDON: “Your response to this attack does not make us feel better about our son’s death. It makes us feel worse.

DANNY GLOVER: “It makes us feel that our government is using our son’s memory as a justification to cause suffering for other sons and parents in other lands.

SUSAN SARANDON: “It is not the first time that a person in your position has been given unlimited power and came to regret it.

DANNY GLOVER: “This is not the time for empty gestures to make us feel better.

SUSAN SARANDON: “It is not the time to act like bullies.

DANNY GLOVER and SUSAN SARANDON: “We urge you to think about how our government can develop peaceful, rational solutions to terrorism —

SUSAN SARANDON: — “solutions that do not sink us —

DANNY GLOVER: — “sink us to the inhuman level of terrorists.

SUSAN SARANDON: “Sincerely, Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez.”

DANNY GLOVER: Saturday, September 15th, 2001.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon. Now to a performance by Carol Maillard, Nadine Mozon, with Cooper-Moore on piano, “Time, Grace and the Courage to Love.”

CAROL MAILLARD: [singing] Mother, mother, mother
There’s far too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There is far too many of you dying
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today, oh

Father, father, father
We don’t need to escalate
War is not the answer
'Cuz only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today

'Cuz these are trying times
Try, try, try, trying times
I'm talking about trying times
It’s what the world is talking about
You’ve got confusion, confusion, confusion, confusion
All, all, all over the land
You’ve got a mother against daughter
You’ve got father against son
The whole thing
The whole thing is getting out of hand
But you know that
Folks, they wouldn’t never had to suffer
If was there was more love
For your sister and your brother
But you know I’m trying to tell you
These are trying times
Trying times
Trying times

NADINE MOZON: The trick to trying times
Is trying to imagine otherwise
Once you’ve been force-fed the unfathomable
The bitter bile of disbelief
Heightened by defeat
May daunt your will to meditate
On better times
Curb your appetite
To swallow something sweet

The trick to trying times
Is trying to dare trust
The ultimate rain of good
As good enough to override
Disheartening dust
Dust that rains despair
And blurs your hungry gaze

CAROL MAILLARD: [singing] More love, more love, more love

NADINE MOZON: The trick to trying times
Is mastering a mind to feel secure
While not a single soul
Can pledge to keep you safe
Military might may not incite
The kind of faith
You want to count on
Life cycles and seasons
Deliver reliable wonders
We all have come to count on
Another day
Revealing itself to all who enter
Breath coming and going
Respecting destiny’s flow
A chance to know l
Love’s deep mystery and majesty
Embedded in the passage of time

The trick to the passage of time
Is not getting mired in a grave moment
Though a moment can leave us forever changed
No moment should leave us forever lingering
Lacking access to time’s natural motion
Each of our lives
Positioned in time
Share a pivotal date with …

AMY GOODMAN: Nadine Mozon, Carol Maillard, with Cooper-Moore, “Time, Grace and the Courage to Love,” their performance at the “Mother Courage: Imagining Peace” performance at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, that was sponsored by MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization in support of the women and children of Afghanistan. We’re going to continue now with Danny Glover reading James Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.” Danny Glover.

DANNY GLOVER: From “My Dungeon” — “My Dungeon Shook,” James Baldwin, “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”

“Dear James:

“I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. …

“I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it and I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be — indeed, one must strive to become — tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of [war];” — but, remember, most of mankind is not all of mankind — “but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

“Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. …

“This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. …

“You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention and by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers, your lost younger brothers, and if the word “integration” means anything, this is what it means, that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend. Do not be driven from it. Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what America must become.

“It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton, dammed rivers, built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, 'The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.'

“You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, James, and Godspeed.

“Your uncle,

“James.”

AMY GOODMAN: Danny Glover reading James Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” at the MADRE event on December 10th, 2001. And we’re going to go back to that event with historian Blanche Wiesen Cook and poet Sonia Sanchez in just a minute here on The War and Peace Report. Visit our website at democracynow.org and also MADRE’s at madre.org. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: George Harrison, here on The War and Peace Report, Resistance Radio. I’m Amy Goodman, as we go back to the MADRE event, “Mother Courage: Imagining Peace,” in support of the women and children of Afghanistan, to Gale Jackson and her own letter to her nephew, “Dear Nephew.”

GALE JACKSON: Chris, this comes with your grandfather Jackson’s flag. Dear nephew, dearest little one, you stood so tall and loving beside me today at the funeral of my father, one of your grandfathers, so it seems right that you should take my father’s flag to carry on, though to bear this standard is not a simple thing for a Black man, for the Black man, for the African American. And today I hand the little boy the job of a man.

This flag barely contains its complicated story. For the Black man, for the African American, this flag is the symbol of both a hope and a betrayal, a dream of freedom and the reality of our slavery, our faith and our disenfranchisement in this country.

Our people built this nation with their dreams. After this land was stolen from the Indigenous people, after so many were slaughtered, after they, African people, came here and lived here in chains, still our people dreamed about freedom. Our people dreamed over the graves of their Native American brothers and sisters and over the graves of their countrymen and women who died in chains. Our people dreamed looking back over the sea which separated them from the motherland and the watery graves where so many Africans had chosen to drown rather than live as slaves. Our people, our ancestors, saw many horrible things. Still they dreamed. Theirs was an ancient human dream, older than any flag or any nation that might enslave them. And when they took up this flag as a banner for their dream, they knew, as we know now, that the liberty and justice which is central to this flag’s promise did not, does not yet exist. But they had faith in their dream, in the human aspiration for democracy and freedom.

And they have fought. Since the very beginning of this national gathering called the United States of America, they have fought to make that dream, those ideas, that symbol, a reality. Through them, the blood in the red stripes of this flag is your own. You know that Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave, a seaman, an African American, was the first to shed blood in the colonial revolt from England. Thousands of Black men fought for American independence, but still there was no freedom. So we kept fighting. You know that Harriet Tubman made 100 trips to liberate people from slave territory, that she served as a spy for the Union Army, that they called her General Harriet Tubman. Two hundred thousand Black troops bore this flag to end slavery. Still, the nation would not embrace the dream. So we kept fighting. Each time this country has called upon those who would stand for democracy and freedom, our people have stood and fought with distinction, passing that dream and that fight down through the generations like the wounded flag bearer passes the flag to the next person who takes it up and keeps it going.

Your grandfather Jackson fought in World War II in Rome, in Arno, in North Apennines, in Po Valley, was wounded more than once and received the Purple Heart fighting for the double victory, fighting against fascism, fighting for that cherished dream. But he fought in a segregated unit. White prisoners of war received better treatment from the United States government than 1 million Black men serving their native land. They were among the best and the bravest, but they were never honored for their service. And when those African American soldiers returned from war, when your grandfather Jackson returned from war, there was still no justice for the Black man, no work for his deep mind, no home for him.

It is this history you have promised to carry on from this military burial when you take the American flag from your grandfather Jackson’s coffin. This is our history. This is our responsibility. This flag comes with a sad and yet finally triumphant story. It’s the dream. And you, our first child, our son, must carry the dream, remembering that the fight will not be one with a gun; remembering that a flag, a nation, can’t contain the human dream; remembering that your grandfather, my father, comes from a long line of soldiers, and we still don’t have justice, though their faith — their faith — has brought us strong, ready, loving and love to this point to Arlington, where we lay my father’s body over the body of his brother in this graveyard of soldiers, where you must see and remember what we have lost and what we have won, and reimagine — reimagine — this fight and this dream for true freedom. With so much love, my baby, with so much love, Aunt Patty.

AMY GOODMAN: Gale Jackson reading her letter to her nephew, “Dear Nephew,” this at the event “Mother Courage: Imagining Peace” in support of the women and children of Afghanistan. You can go to MADRE.org. In a minute, we go to Blanche Wiesen Cook. You can also go to our website at democracynow.org or mail us at mail@democracynow.org. Now to historian Blanche Wiesen Cook reading from her book, Eleanor Roosevelt.

BLANCHE WIESEN COOK: In 1952, Eleanor Roosevelt toured India and the awakening East — the title of her book. She toured Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, India and Pakistan. She made this trip, she explained, because her United Nations colleagues were outraged when, in 1950, the Children’s Emergency Fund was ended. The U.S. and its allies believed the emergency in Europe was over, the fund was no longer necessary. But her friends from Lebanon and Pakistan argued that the emergency continued. Countless children still starved. That had been the case for hundreds of years, the U.S. State Department replied. There was no emergency about it. When Eleanor Roosevelt’s colleagues said to her, “You don’t care about our children because they are not white,” she decided to make that trip to see for herself. When she returned, UNICEF became a permanent agency.

Her activist politics against humiliation and powerlessness were rooted in her commitment to dignity and decency for all people. She was convinced, as she said in 1934, “We will all go ahead together, or we will all go down together.” The day the atomic bomb was dropped, we came into a new world, a world in which we had to learn to live in friendship with our neighbors of every race and creed and color, or face the fact that we might be wiped off the face of the Earth. Either we do have friendly relations, or we do away with civilization. We must wake up and see. What we really want to do, we can do.

After the U.N. General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December, 1948, she worked tirelessly for its adoption everywhere, and wrote, “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of individual persons, the neighborhood, the school, the factory, the farm, the office — such places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”

In Tomorrow Is Now, her last book, published posthumously, she looked forward. “With proper education, a strong sense of responsibility for our own actions, with a clear awareness that our future is linked with the welfare of the world as a whole, we may anticipate that the life of the next generation will be more peaceful, more rewarding than any we have ever known. But for that to be true, we must resurrect the word 'liberal,' which derives from the word 'free.' We must cherish and honor the word 'free,' or it will cease to apply to us. The vital power of ideas to transform society will prevail, when ideas are faced with imagination, integrity, courage. Ultimately, the influence you exert is through your own life and what you’ve become yourself.”

AMY GOODMAN: Historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, reading from Eleanor Roosevelt, her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. And now to the poet Sonia Sanchez at the MADRE event several weeks ago in honor of, to benefit the women and children of Afghanistan. MADRE.org is their website. Democracynow.org is ours. This is poet Sonia Sanchez.

SONIA SANCHEZ: “Aaaayeee Babo,” “Aaaayeee Babo (Praise God).”

1.

There are women sailing the sky
I walk between them
They who wear silk, muslin and burlap skins touching mine
They who dance between urine and violets
They who are soiled disinherited angels with masculine eyes.

This earth is a hard symmetry
This earth of feverish war
This earth inflamed with hate
This patch of tongues corroding the earth’s air.
Who will journey to the place we require of humans?
I grow thin on these algebraic equations reduced to a final
common denominator.

2.

I turn away from funerals from morning lightning
I feast on rain and laughter
What is this sound I hear moving through our bones
I breathe out leaving our scent in the air.

3.

I came to this life with serious hands
I came observing the terrorist eyes moving in and out of
Southern corners
I wanted to be the color of bells
I wanted to surround trees and spill autumn from my fingers
I came to this life with serious feet–heard other footsteps
gathering around me
Women whose bodies exploded with flowers.

4.

Life.
Life is
from curled embryo
to greed
to flesh
transistors
webpages obscuring butterflies.

Our life
is a feast of flutes
orbiting chapels
no beggar women here
no treasonous spirit here
just a praise touch
created from our spirit tongues
We bring the noise of mountain language
We bring the noise of Sunday mansions
We enter together paddling a river of risks
in order to reshape This wind, This sea,
This sky, This dungeon of syllables
We have become nightingales singing us out of fear
Splashing the failed places with light.

We are here
On the green of leaves
On the shifting waves of blues,
Knowing once that our places divided us
Knowing once that our color divided us
Knowing once that our class divided us
Knowing once that our sex divided us
Knowing once that our country divided us
Now we carry the signature of women in our veins
Now we build our reconciliation canes in morning fields
Now the days no longer betray us
and we ascend into wave after wave of our blood milk.
What can we say without blood?

5.

AMY GOODMAN: Sonia Sanchez. And that concludes our excerpts of the “Mother Courage: Imagining Peace” event in support of the women and children of Afghanistan. For more information and to make contributions to the women and children of Afghanistan through MADRE, you can go to MADRE.org. That’s www.madre.org and you can go to our website at www.democracynow.org, and please email us at mail@democracynow.org. Also like to hear what you think are the biggest events of this year. Please call us and let us know what you think. We’ll be playing listener comments at 212-209-2999. That’s 212-209-2999. That event was recorded by Orlando Richards. Democracy Now! in Exile is produced by Lizzy Ratner, Kris Abrams, Brad Simpson, Miranda Kennedy. Anthony Sloan is our engineer and music maestro. We are broadcasting in exile from the embattled studios of WBAI, from the studios of the banned and the fired, the studios of our listeners. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.