Just Saying/See You There: Love Languages for Collaboration

Yesterday was our third Eye to Eye Webinar session on love, faith, difference and communication entitled "The Only Language I Know."  We shared our poetic clarity about how we communicate differently based on our experiences, our approaches, our fears and our longings and how sometimes words seem to fail us all together.  Our group poem represents our visioning process of creating a space where there is room for everyone we are, and who we are not, and who we might become together.

Just Saying/See You There

By the Brilliance Remastered Eye to Eye Participants
After Audre Lorde’s “At First I Thought You Were Talking About…”

I speak the language of roots up, all the way everything must be changed.
She speaks the language of measurable deliverables.
I speak the language of rainwater-clarification-process-matters.
They speak jampack big words together like a train

I speak the language of here right here at home.
He speaks the language of inevitable uprise class struggle like science.

I speak in things felt a knowing of my bones
He through well thought out equations elaborate logic models
I speak in hope
Him pragmatism

I speak "like me"
She speaks I like you, but not always
She speaks me first. She speaks my kids first. She speaks secrets

I speak 69 years. He speaks FaceBook

I speak plan with flexibility.
They speak plan and stick to it.
I speak student wants and needs
They speak stick to what we need to see only

I speak possible risky let's do it
they speak practical hedged bet sacrifice
I speak concepts & ideas are real, they are tangible, touchable.
They speak “huh, what you what you talking bout sistah?”

I speak seek the relationship
They speak: seek the product(s)

I speak the language of the academy sometimes
he speaks shyness, grammar of booze and sex
sometimes I speak no grammar language

But I know that:
“Black girls are from the future”[1]  and that
“Everything we do is insignificant. Yet it is incredibly
important that we do it.” [2] And that
Children are full people who have something to say
And that trusting is like tree roots and we reach down, tangled up
And that everything we need is already within us
And that I am who I am doing what I came to do
And that our silence will NOT save us.

SO I am seeking the place where the language of risky radicalism
meets the pragmatism of those who have seen the consequences
the place where afrofuturefearlessness meets blackbloodsoilhistory
the place where we feel whole meets
the place where we are allowed to be prisms of light

the place where faith meets shaking legs

the place where level headed realists can meet starry eyed dreamers
the place where good intentions meet critical implementation
the place where longing meets listening
the place where yes meets i know
the place where why meets when

the place where--as white people--we remember without expectation of forgiveness
we account for what has been lost and stolen
the place where but i have _______ friends, so I couldn't be __________
meets self introspection

the place where bourgie balancing meets grace
where press and curl meets this is my natural curl

the place where longing children meet absent parents
the place where wholeness meets brokenness
where miracles equal a mere embrace

the place where courage (like jumping into a cold river)
meets self-determination (where are the rocks at the bottom)
the place where the long night meets the pale kiss of morning
the place where water and sky are indistinguishable

the place how i was raised meets raise UP!
the place where can't get right GETS RIGHT

the place where hope meets salvation
where the souls of the living dance hot and fast in love, light
and treating each other right

the place where the love you always wanted meets the love you always had

See you there.

---

[1] Renina Weems

[2] Ghandi