Song (Of What I Cannot Unsee)
NaPoWriMo Day19 Trans and Watching the World Burn: A Song and Poem of Silence and Survival
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This poem and mixed media digital art is my contribution to the NaPoWriMo Day 19 with the following prompt:
And now for our daily prompt – optional as always. This one is inspired by Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Song.”
The word “tragedy” comes from the Greek for “goat song.” The song in Kelly’s poem is quite literally a goat song. The poem also describes a tragedy, both in the modern sense of an awful event, and the ancient dramatic sense of a play in which someone does something terrible, and the play’s action shows the consequences.
The poem has a timeless, could-have-happened-anywhere/anywhen quality that I associate with blues and folk ballads – including murder ballads (a subgenre of song dealing with a gruesome crime, first arising from broadsheet ballads sold at English executions, and which later came to America in forms like “The Knoxville Girl” and then morphed their way into country music).
Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that tells a story in the style of a blues song or ballad. One way into this prompt may be to use it to retell a family tragedy or story, or to retell a crime or tragic event that occurred in your hometown.”
#artstackpoets
If you rather like to listen to it.
Song (Of What I Cannot Unsee)
Listen:
They do not come with hoods.
They do not come with torches.
They come with policies.
They come with budget cuts.
They come with silence.
They come wearing flags,
smiling behind podiums,
talking about family
while they dismantle every system meant to keep you alive.
I have to watch this.
I watch my transgender siblings vanish—
from schools,
from job applications,
from medical forms,
from court records,
from gravestones that don’t even bother to say our names right.
You think this is exaggeration?
Go ask the mother of the child
who died because he couldn’t get hormones.
Or the father who was fired for wearing lipstick.
Or the kid who was told
“you’ll be expelled if you keep saying you’re a boy.”
I watch girls forced to carry pregnancies
for rapists,
for abusers,
for lawmakers who will never know what it means to bleed
and be told your pain is holy.
I watch women turned into evidence
and embryos given more rights than bodies.
I watched Abrego Garcia disappear.
No crime.
No trial.
He was a father.
He worked.
He paid taxes.
He was American.
And they dragged him out of his home like garbage.
Shipped him to El Salvador.
Locked him in CECOT,
a prison they call a miracle.
But it is not a miracle.
It is hell in steel and concrete.
He never got a bunk.
He never got a call.
He got forgotten.
I watch immigrants die in buses with broken AC.
I watch them raped and silenced and deported.
And the country calls it “border security.”
They say it’s to “protect you.”
But I know who “you” is meant to include.
And it’s not me.
And it’s not them.
And it’s not anyone who can’t hide behind whiteness.
I watch diseases come back.
I watch HIV rise again while people pretend it’s gone.
I watch AIDS spread in countries too poor to matter to the pharmaceutical gods.
I watch people begging for meds they can’t afford
because someone decided profit is more important than people.
I watch climate warnings deleted.
I watch fire devour forests.
I watch the water rise
and the world throw up its hands
and say “well, we can’t do anything now.”
They can.
They won’t.
They’ve chosen this.
I watch the poison in the food—
the chemicals,
the additives,
the cheap ingredients they sneak in
because no one is watching the regulators anymore.
Because they fired them all.
Because they defunded the protections.
Because they don’t care if you eat plastic
as long as the CEOs get a bonus.
And while I watch,
people die.
Quiet deaths.
Preventable deaths.
Deaths that come by waiting too long,
or being too poor,
or saying the wrong name,
or praying in the wrong language,
or loving the wrong body.
They are not accidents.
They are policy.
They are deliberate.
I have to see this.
I am made to see this.
Every. Single. Day.
This is the song:
A list of names.
A growing silence.
A pile of bodies.
A graveyard called democracy.
This is the song:
Of erasure.
Of neglect.
Of policy as murder.
Of brutality dressed in law.
And I am not allowed to look away.
Because I am trans.
Because I am queer.
Because I am nonbinary.
Because I am immigrant-adjacent.
Because I love people the state has already marked for disappearance.
I do not get to rest.
I do not get to forget.
I do not get to unsee.
So I name it.
So I scream it.
So I write it here,
so even if I’m next,
this truth stays behind.
Where I come from, I know what it means to live under control masked as care.
I spent 47 years under the authoritarian grip of my mother.
I live in Germany, in a society that has long ostracized me—and still does.
Not as cruel, maybe, but familiar in its silence.
This isn’t just history to me. I’ve lived it.
And though I’m not in North America, my heart and soul have always belonged there.
What happens on North American soil—I take personally.
Wild Lion*esses Pride is read across 49 US states and 40 countries. Thank you for walking this path beside me.
Powerful and terrifying. All of this is happening right before our eyes and we cannot afford to look away.
Chilling, Wild Lioness. 😔