This weekend’s Last is a Verb: Archiving After the End of the World Intensive was MIRACULOUS. Seven star-seeking, memory-keeping geniuses activated ancestral love, brave knowing and revolutionary vulnerability towards clarity and action about the world we want to keep, the systemic and internal patterns we want to destroy and the possibilities implied by the archive of our being.  Does that sound deep? It was.  We dug deep and emerged dirty and resplendent, like the planet.

On our first day together we engaged Audre Lorde’s theories of survival, Octavia Butler’s examination of Ooloi as an archivist gender for remembering and recreating life in infinite contexts, offered each other the archives held and lost by our own names and our relationships to our names, and the knowing held and kept in our physical bodies.  And that was just the first day.   I will be sharing blog posts for the res of the week about what else we did, but for now, we want to offer a poem we created by thinking about what knowledges and longings we have archived so deeply in our bodies, minds and hearts that we could create whole worlds out of them, in the tradition of the Oankali Ooloi.

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Possible Worlds: (From the Archives of Our Being)

 

By the Last is a Verb: Archiving After the End of the World Participants

 

I could build a world of running away.

I could build a world of talking back.

I could build a world made from the joy found in my great grandmother’s smile.

I could build a world of my grandmother’s laughter. Her idioms. Her broken French.

I could build a world of that look mama gives sometimes.

I could build a world of great grandma’s teacakes and yardbird for dinner.

I could build a world of women waking early to bake bread.

I could build a world of answered letters and congratulatory cards.

I could build a world of Black feminists asking about each other’s daughters.

I could build a world of books and time to read them.

I could build a world of love.

I could build a world of yes.

I could build a world of mutual acceptance.

I could build a world of bad typing and supernatural syntax.

I could build a world of painless hands.

I could build a world of middle-aged flabby acceptance.

I could build a world of sacred drumming as the background rhythm to everything.

I could build a world of gifts my brother picked up off the ground.

I could build a world of everyone sleeping peacefully always.

I could build a world of dreams from rocks kept under pillows.

I could build a world of love singing first thing in the morning.

I could build a world of weightless floating.

I could build a world of flower filled baths.

I could build a world of tears cried at graduations.

I could build a world of self-possessed strutting in the best way.

I could build a world of the presence of horses, everywhere.

I could build a world of desire remaking escape.

I could build a world of prayers heard and questions celebrated.

I could build a world of listening as medicine.

I could build a world of healing breaths.

I could build a world of laughing out loud, often.

I could build a world of cherished surprise.

I could build a world of pleasure made of honey and cinnamon.

I could make a world of black feminist poetics.

I could build a world of worlds burnt down.

I could build a world of worlds remade.

 

 

I could build a world without borders.

I could build a world where words come easy.

I could build a world where black joy flows in abundance.

I could build a world where the cure for jealousy is adoration.

I could build a world where a powerful woman is valued and never feared.

I could build a world where Black women believe they are enough.

I could build a world where mothers can find time to rest.

I could build a world where shame doesn’t exist.

I could build a world where Love is Love is Love is.

I could build a world where double chins are fine.

I could build a world where no one is surprised when young people shine.

I could build a world where you do not have to have money to live well.

I could build a world where playing is everyone’s job, sometimes.

I could build a world where there is enough clean water for everyone.

I could build a world where we breathe saltwater so no one drowns and no one is alone.

I could build a world where greed is dissolved.

I could build a world where housing is for people, not for profit.

I could build a world where everyone knows where home is.

I could build a world where everyone’s story is heard.

I could build a world where people regularly share about our conversations with the land.

I could build a world where everyone knows cooperation and love are the true qualities of humanness.

I could build a world where there are no prisons.

I could build a world where ‘divide and conquer’ is impossible.

I could build a world where art is not extra.

I could build a world where darkness is not the metaphor for everything evil.

I could build a world where healing with sound and color is an everyday occurrence.

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