People Get Ready
This past weekend, I watched a veto-proof group of Minneapolis City Council members commit to a future where community health professionals replace the police. That is a staggering step toward societal transformation. And amidst all the righteous and visionary political verbiage that attended the event, what stood out most were the poems. Andrea Jenkins, a politician-poet I have the honor of knowing, read two poems, including her iconic “Why I Wear Purple.” Junauda Petrus-Nasah read the poem, “Could We Please Give the Police Departments to the Grandmothers,” which prominent activists have said gave them the imaginative vigor necessary to envision a world without police.
Junauda, who I also have the honor of knowing, never misses an opportunity to invoke Prince, who energizes this city like a patron saint of sensuality and determination. The day the Minneapolis City Council made their historical commitment was also Prince’s birthday. This is not a coincidence, my friends. I will remind you that his band was called The Revolution.
As we gather again this week to get through this thing called life, I want to circle back to my other favorite Prince poet, Khalil, a young BIPOC autist who always finds the right thing to say, even if he isn’t able to produce autonomous speech. His Unrestricted Editions chapbook, Purple Rain / Exodus, remains ever on my mind. Here are two poems that are ringing especially loud right now, both of them from the Exodus side of his book, written under the muse of that other revolutionary poet-singer, Bob Marley.
We have tolerated the harvest of strange fruit for far too long. That should be utterly clear now. People get ready for a future where voices like Prince and Bob Marley and Andrea Jenkins and Junauda Petrus-Nasah and Khalil are bearing the smart, kind, and revolutionary fruit we need to feel authentically connected.
With Purple Glue between My Eyes and Yours,
Chris