April 1, 2019
After a week off, we’re back with another installment of this year’s Voqal Fellowship poem, Cooperative and Collaborative Politics of Change. As we’ve mentioned in past blog posts this poem was created by Adrian H. Molina through a process called Live Scribe Poetics that took place during the Fellowship convening back in January.
III. Bloc by Block
We come from struggle and hustle.
We are transformation—
notorious gang leaders turned civil rights organizers.
We are the sons and daughters of history.
Some of us come from privilege,
immersed in judgement, we find beauty
in the reality of diversity.
We are open and proud of our sexuality.
We learned to claim ourselves.
We are survivors and self healers.
We are translators,
keepers of history,
tellers of story,
speakers of two and three tongues.
We build bridges, floating
across the rivers of inhumanity.
We are the formerly incarcerated.
We are presently free,
geniuses, award winners,
blowing stereotypes out of the water.
Don’t judge us. Don’t patronize us, either.
We will make top of the class on our own.
We rehabilitate self to rehabilitate community.
We come from poverty.
We come from immigrants. So
we come from creativity.
We grit through what we have to,
to show and prove, to make familia proud,
but we will do us, by our own means,
in our own names, without apology.
Make no mistake, there are no mistakes.
We are the answers.
We are tragedy, so we are comedy.
We will make you fall in love with our laughter.
We will improvise through the bullshit,
the cosmic play of characters,
until we land on something Real.
We quit jobs. We build apps. We make games.
We curse freely in professional development seminars.
Cool huh? We meet the world where it’s at.
Cuz none of us came back around to be fake.
We are Dreamers
within the nightmare of injustice.
We may be born one way
but we will follow our spirits, transform
and become exactly who we need to be.
Then we will change the world.
We are from mixed backgrounds
so our parents think we are mixed up,
confused and irrational, because we are
fusing their histories, stories and tools
with deep knowledge of self, self-designed cool.
We are alchemy. We are honoring the past
by creating the future.
We are healing the ancestors
with our courage.
Did we mention that we come from struggle
and through creative hustle
we blaze trails. We dig within. We battle isms.
We ask questions. We unearth truths.
We throw parties. We learn lessons.
We read patterns. We re-pattern.
We are designers and masters of patterns.
They see us evolve and think
we must have taken secret trips
to Jupiter and Saturn.
We will blow your earthbound minds.
We are grounded. We Wash and Learn.
We are here to Game the System, Bloc by Block.
We are Issue Voters. We are visionaries.
We are the Notes from the Cleffs and the cliffs.
We are the edges, where land meets water,
where forests open, where rocks emerge from earth,
where spirits grow, where destiny merges.
We are here to EAT, and to make sure
that everyone eats through equity and transformation.
We are GenQ. We are the Media.
We use Ink to Influence the weirdos, wonks and geeks,
the academics, the artists and freaks,
who direct and shift the cultures of the masses.
You can learn more about Adrian and his work at molinaspeaks.com.
Learn more about the Voqal Fellowship and the 2019 Voqal Fellows here.