Spoken Word: ‘Grito’ by Briseis Perez
Grito
Brown is no longer associated with
The warm aroma of coffee or
a skins’ glow under the sun
but the mud on our boots
Not the tea or cocoa that
dances on our tongues
but the building eroding rust
They challenge us
To see how much we can take
and then act shocked when
They find out we actually break
We stand, walk, march and shout
Nothing other than retaliate
And I’ve cultivated myself
To be exactly what the people
Hate
I’m proud to say I’ve
made myself in such disdain
I carry the same dreaded past and pain
The same riots in 2003
The Black Eyed Peas had some sense
when they said we got terrorists like the CIA
The Bloods, Crips and the KKK
And in 2016 we built a wall as a tall as
The podium we hold our idols to
Elected on the same grounds
Where people were lost and never found
Supporting overseas the fight for promised land
Not so promised when the blood of 73,000
and counting stain the soil red
Countless more unaccounted for and dead
A theme transcendent across generations
In the big 26 the wealth inequality so grand
All of Americans 99% would never augment
to those billions held by few
Who couldn’t care less
That your father’s being deported
and that your rent is overdue
Who couldn’t care less about
Your piling stress
And emotional duress
Because they’re out there living their best life
Ignorant to the world
All the poverty and strife
In California
the homeless rate is still 14% higher than 2019
In Minnesota
The MNPD is protecting I.C.E.
And violating people’s natural rights
The right to protest
What ever happened to freedom of speech?
What ever happened to a nice calming day
that ended in walks at the beach?
The Pacific Ocean between Cali and Japan
Filled with 3 trillion plastics and marine debris
The Arctic Circle has glaciers melting
Climate change exposing minerals never
seen to the world before
Didn’t Orwell’s 1984 and Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451 warn us what would be done?
Thousands of books threatened to burn
NASA’s closure has me thinking of
May 10, 1933
34 universities, 20,000 books
Why’s our president acting like a Nazi?
A lot of people are talking about WW3
And a lot of people who turn the other way
But this is what’s happening
Threatening to use weapons of mass destruction
Did we not see what happened in Nagasaki
and Hiroshima?
How do people believe him?
Our families struggle
The streets look empty all the
vendors have gone into hiding
People I used to see
My backpack buddies
Washed away like shells after the tide comes in
Wiped from history like the books whose
ashes floated away from eternity
Like the indigenous pushed out of their land
Exiled into near extinction
Like the lost languages because people went
beaten and disciplined
Eradicating harmony and tradition
For greedy-hypocrisy and a twisted sense of
democracy
This is what’s happening
Speak now or forever hold your peace
Because 6 feet under is where you’ll be
and all of us right there next to you
Miserable and
Drained blue
11TH Grade, Ánimo Leadership
Guiding Teacher: Maire Rose Pike
