is proud to announce the winner of the People Before Profits Poetry Prize: Aya de León for "Grito de Vieques" |
KPFA: Prayer for a Station
Under Siege
(written during the KPFA lockout 7/99
© 2000 Aya de León
I don't think I'm being presumptuous
today when I say I believe God is on our
side. Because scriptures all over the world speak of the holy
power of the truth
and KPFA is all about telling the truth--about political and social
and cultural issues.
By no means the most important, but perhaps the most well known
in this
country, is the biblical quote, "know the truth and the truth
shall set you free."
But there are forces out there that don't want us to tell the
truth and above all
don't want us to be free. But we know that there are forces stronger
than Lynn
Chadwick and Mary Frances Berry and the Berkeley Police, and the
Pacifica Board amd
the FDA and corporate power and the government and the new world
order. And
whether you call that force God or Orisha, or Allah, or Great
Mystery, or Hashem, or the Goddess, or Buddha Consciousness or
Krishna, or Loa or Christo, or the Universe, or
your higher power or Mother Nature or the power of the people,
we know that there are
forces out there; forces for truth and justice and love.
And we count on those forces in our struggles. I want to remind
us of the cases
of Cuba and Haiti. There is no earthly explanation for the victories
of these small
islands against French colonialism and US imperialism; tiny, poor
island nations of
colored people winning and holding out for decades against rich,
white, world powers.
We know the victories of the revolutionary movements and the revolutionary
armies
weren't just about organizing strategies and battle plans, they
were about Orisha and
Loa. They were about dead Black people marching right along side
Toussaint
L'Overture, about Lucumi spirits rolling down the Sierra Maestra
with Fidel.
And I want to begin today by calling on our ancesters. Not only
our personal
ancestors, but our political ancestors, people who told the truth:
like:
Ella Baker & Don Pedro Albuzu Campos & Sojouner Truth
& Emma Goldman & Jose
Marti & Audre Lorde & Ghandi & Sandino & Fannie
Lou Hamer & those who died telling
the truth & fighting for justice: Ken Saro Wiwa & the
Rosenbergs & Stephen Biko &
Ernesto Che Guevara & Malcolm X & Salvador Allende &
Maurice Bishop & Emiliano
Zapata & Patrice Lumumba & Judy Bari & Kamel Nasser
& Amilcar Cabral & Ma Kli Ing.
I call upon all of our living martys, political prisoners in
the US, locked up for
intolerably long years, or facing death for what they did not
do, or had every right to do
in the face of what the US government was doing to our people.
Mumia Abu Jamal
& Leonard Peltier & the recently freed Dylcia Pagan. And
our leaders in exile
who left with a price on their heads: Assata Shakur, William Morales.
Let the exiles
and political prisoners teach us patience and faith in the inevitability
of that
victory.
So we stand before you, Spirit, and we ask you to wake Lynn Chadwick
and Mary Frances Berry out of their reactionary nightmare. And
we ask you to pressure the
consciences of the Pacifica Board, til they can't get to sleep
at night worrying about
how many local, national and international injustices will go
on in secret without KPFA
to go tell it on the mountain.
Well in this urban life, KPFA is our mountain, and God, you know
we need to
tell it. We need to tell on Willie Brown and Niketown, and the
republicans and the
democrats. KPFA is our mountain and the programmers are the town
criers of our
modern society. And like the poet Peter Harris said, Hand me
My Griot Clothes
I wanna be dressed and ready when they open those doors back up.
Philip Maldari set your alarm
clock.
Apprentices, don't fill up all your free time.
Art Sato, dust off those old jazz Lps.
Walter Turner, get ready to let us know what's going on in the
motherland.
Luid Medina, fire me up a hot mambo, because--oh Lord, I want
to be in that
number--when the KPFA staff goes marching back in.
Ashe.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Aya de León is the winner of The People Before Profits Poetry Prize for her poem "Grito de Vieques". She is a writer and activist, living in Oakland, CA. Her writing has appeared in anthologies and broadcast on KPFA. We were moved by "KPFA: Prayer for a Station Under Siege," which inspired many to continue the struggle to reopen community-sponsored, free-speech KPFA in the face of the Pacifica Foundation censorship and lockout of 1999.