catch the fire

revolutionary breath and endurance

Friends,

It’s tempting to avert one’s eyes from hell’s teeth. Also, easy to feel that it’s wrong to be silly or joyful while others suffer greatly. Have you felt this way?

I was once so sad about the world, after a year of relief work from Hurricane Katrina, that I felt it was wrong to look at a flower and feel pleasure. It felt shameful and wrong to look at a butterfly and feel beauty or hope; to believe in a monarch butterfly, pollen and a world with goodness. This feeling itself was a kind of illness. I’d seen too much pain, and knew of such pain in people, that it felt disloyal to laugh and dance, as if one would cancel out the other.

Now I understand that as a trauma response, whether primary or secondary (vicarious) trauma, or a mix. I had to stop doing almost everything for several months—six, to be exact—in order to recover.

The healing was simple togetherness with others, not speaking. Looking away from the pain, looking at the moon, looking at the feet of dancers, starting to move my own feet like theirs. Making room in the well of my body for joy to live, to stretch to fill the granaries, to flow into my cells—alongside the other awareness, of grief, cruelty, inhumanity. I had to learn it was alright to look away, to stare at the center of a flower, to listen to water running, to, as Sonia Sanchez says, “Catch the fire…and live.”

Catch the Fire

by Sonia Sanchez

(Sometimes I wonder:
What to say to you now
in the soft afternoon air as you
hold us all in a single death?)
I say—
Where is your fire?
I say—
Where is your fire?

You got to find it and pass it on.
You got to find it and pass it on
from you to me from me to her from her
to him from the son to the father from the
brother to the sister from the daughter to
the mother from the mother to the child.

Where is your fire?  I say where is your fire?
Can’t you smell it coming out of our past?
The fire of living…not dying
The fire of loving…not killing
The fire of Blackness…not gangster shadows.
Where is our beautiful fire that gave light
to the world?
The fire of pyramids;
The fire that burned through the holes of
slaveships and made us breathe;

The fire that made guts into chitterlings;
The fire that took rhythms and made jazz;

The fire of sit-ins and marches that made
us jump boundaries and barriers;
The fire that took street talk sounds
and made righteous imhotep raps.
Where is your fire, the torch of life
full of Nzingha and Nat Turner and Garvey
and DuBois and Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin
and Malcolm and Mandela.
Sister/Sistah  Brother/Brotha  Come/Come

CATCH YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
HOLD YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
LEARN YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
BE THE FIRE…DON’T KILL
Catch the fire and burn with eyes
that see our souls:
WALKING.
SINGING.
BUILDING.
LAUGHING.
LEARNING.
LOVING.
TEACHING.
BEING.
Hey.  Brother/Brotha.  Sister/Sista.
Here is my hand.
Catch the fire…and live.
live.
livelivelive.
livelivelive.
live.
live.

from Collected Poems by Sonia Sanchez, Beacon, 2021

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Creative Invitation

• Write a message to someone you want to call back to life; someone who may be slipping into isolation, despair or apathy, or need to hear your voice.

• Draw your own life force with colored markers or pencils. Sketch your community as a circle around you. Shapes, faces, colors, whatever you feel like. Give your community a name. Give your life force a name.

• Listen to Sonia Sanchez’s incantatory reading of her poem in this video.

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The art above is from Flowers of Fire: Illustrations from Japanese Fireworks Catalogues (ca. 1880s).