Where are you?

[Storyteller]

You have poetry in your blood, yes?
You haven't much of a history, not of dominance or of conquerers,
which authored your history....

except within you
it seems a great dormant need to express it all.
It must be, it has to be.

other people who have suffered and lived through
epochs of hardship and suppression.
Black people, all dark skinned people, but look at the American blacks.

They were slaves for over three hundred years
and then lived in total suppression for another hundred years after that,
say, until Martin Luther KIng

They had poetry
the kind of poetry that sings within the depths of the heart
originating from down into their souls.

They were like you
people of the earth
tilling and tilling and tilling
and they would have loved to have been considered peasants,
not ******s.

You have something that is stopping this great blank canvas
from being painted.
It seems there needs to be reconciliation;
when there's guilt, Catholicism, and God
there's shame and paralysis
But God forgives, that's our privilege and his gift.

Look at other poets:
the Irish

But you say they were a pure people
an island nation
and they had no Stalin to aniliate their race
their culture
True that. They had the British.

All I am saying
to my anscetral brethren
is to speak, to express and to sing
now there is no Stalin or *&$%n' Soviet system
it is now time to let it out.

Where are you?