writing

walking and talking with June, shares the load and eases the pain

| Sheree

Is it only Wednesday? What a week already and it’s only Wednesday.

Walking down the street, shooting the breeze and sun with June . I ask her, how come her words are so profound?

She nods and smiles.

It’s the living who keep the dead alive. It’s the living who keep the dead alive. They come alive when their words come through our mouths.

And on the other side Black girls are free – wherever/whatever that may be.

I wish I was on that Other side as this side sure is a lot to carry. A lot for one to carry. I moan. I whinge okay, girl’s got to let it out somehow.

Burdens, trauma, mournings and death are not supposed to be carried alone.

Sharing the pain, easing the pain. In community. I want me some of that.

Is it only Wednesday? My life, this week has been hard already and too much to bear alone.

i’m tired …

| Sheree

I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

Fanny Lou Hamer

a sea of skulls each one different from the next

| Sheree

after Ron Mueck


“Mass” by Ron Mueck at NGV Triennial

Here is a mass

of white upon white

skulls, tumbling

everywhere upon the galleries’ floor

a turning sea, resting

biting into another

black holes

shadowed sockets

promising questions without answers

a warning? a threat?

what remains long after our bodies have decayed

an impressive 100 skulls,

dwarfing visitors as they loom

here and here, cool, corridors

as catacombs above ground

forcing us to face our mortality, yes,

but also a certain care is needed in life for each other. Yes?

Beauty in the wayward

| Sheree

It is hard to explain what’s beautiful about a rather ordinary colored girl, a face difficult to discern in the crowd, an average chorine not destined to be a star or even the heroine of a feminist plot. In some regard, it is to recognize the obvious that is reluctantly ceded: the beauty of the black ordinary, the beauty that resides in and animates the determination to live ­ free. Beauty is not a luxury; it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, a transfiguration of the given. Only the wayward appreciated this girl’s riotous conduct and wild habits—­ her longing to create a life from nothing. Only they could discern the beautiful plot against the plantation that she waged each and ­ every day.

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives