Source: In These Times
by Julia Wright
“My first encounter with poetry was a haiku by my father. He would say to me, ’You can write them, too!’ After his death, I finally ventured into writing those short poems and realized they were all about breath, how we breathe the world in and out, in moments of inter-being. When Eric Garner and George Floyd were blood-choked to the point of being definitively deprived of breath, poetry became a legitimate weapon, enabling us as a death-bound people to breathe, whatever the pressure. After October 7, the haiku I wrote became longer …. There is no breath, no poem long enough to say the solidarity we, Black American people, feel ancestrally for our brothers and sisters in Palestine. The tragedy of children, babies born into the genocide who survive for a time only to die from it, is almost impossible to ’poeticize.'” (02/24/25)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/poetry-as-a-unifying-weapon-julia-wright-richard-refaat-alareer