Activist’s Poem (or An Ode to Unlearning)

I’d rather bite off my own mango arm

Than spend another seminar inside this box with its mirrors and architecture

All millimeter-measured by a Netherlandish painter

Who has crept slowly through the centuries to torment me with his miniature world,

designed to perfection, nothing left to chance.

His shapes are all redefined to register the same height, color, odor

in woman’s critical eye.

He told me it was a gift

He wanted to make sense of the earth

But it seems like a cruel mockery of what we content ourselves with

Of what we are content to call “ourselves”.

I don’t want a magical box to shrink my world to fit into the palm of my hand.

I want a world that I am continually chasing, picking up a tiny corner in both my arms With all of my 2-bit muscle strength

And with the will of my ten thousand nearest and dearest

As if it were a vast patchwork quilt made by somebody’s grandmother.

And when a jubilant guest accidentally spills some champagne on it

Well maybe we can laugh and call it a happy accident

Embroider a commemorative plaque at the site with silver thread that smells like the incense burned in a tiny monastery on the top of a hill

in a country I still hesitate to breathe in.

The incense casts a glow stretching over even little me, stitching art-savant style. I have renounced all those lectures, readings, diplomas

having found on my never-ending journey not one teacher

but six billion.

What is one mango arm anyways

when beyond sweaty, humid classroom 2B

(“call maintenance for projector assistance”)

there are five hundred thousand mango trees

with new fruit in every shade both unforeseen and unimaginable?

every future iridescent, rainbow-flavored juicy mouthful is murmuring to us

Not always low-hanging but there nonetheless, waiting

for someone like you and someone like me to nurture into as near perfection as our pint-sized pairs of hands can manage

hands that sometimes tremble, other times decisive and swift with the conviction that our aching patchwork legends will someday become

Reality.

- Kelly Michelle