The Answer to Domestic Violence
How should sisters respond?
When there is no community justice, no uncles, brothers or cousins to grab hold and protect us after a bold and confident aggressor paints his way through our worlds mangling trust and smiling when he’s done.
When the prison industrial complex is the only offering you deny us, condemning us to silence decorated with your glances to the ground coated with songs of red black and green liberation.
When ears are clogged and eyes are veiled to the grabs, shakes, intimidation, violence and grey thoughts challenging child safety, we ask, how should sisters respond?
Our silence seems to buy your comfort and acceptance that we love our people more than our safety.
How should sisters respond when you don’t want to talk about it and our begging words of help, to your ears, challenge your vision of the movement.
When you offer no safety and would rather wait for the hymens to be damaged and muted expecting their blood to spell out courageous details of survival each and every time it happens.
How should sisters respond when you never ask the questions in your meetings, closed door conversations and statements of solidarity…
What do you need?
How can we help?
What scares you?
and
What can help you feel safe?
How should sisters respond when the only goal in this poem is questioning you, being believed and never being left to fight alone?
Let’s wait until damaged souls feel brave enough to share without the offer of true protection, with the burden of proof dangling between their legs and peeling back their most shamed of moments.
How should sisters respond when the initial action smells of unchecked arrogance, free will and believability with no tribunal, no presence before a council just a serving of sincerity and survival stating ‘I’ll do better the next time.’
Show us the path to safety so we know how to respond to please you.
Show us the path to protection so you cannot leave us alone to fight.
We pray in silence for a path without our own imprisonment as our only option.
Tell us how to respond so you can feel content, we can feel safe and our children not be harmed.
If you have no answers to any of these questions, we are not in the same movement for righteousness and freedom.
Sisters can never feel free until we can first feel safe.
Our answer is and will always be, we will fight for safety, by any means necessary.
So, how will you respond beyond your present answer of silence?