by Melissa S. Green | originally posted at Henkimaa

does anyone beat your heart for you —
oh yes I know there are some who
will quicken it
or slow it at their leaving —
but when you are alone at night
and sleeping, dreamless . . .
it is there . . . beating —
it will be there . . . beating —
till you die

does anyone beat your heart for you
does anyone live your life for you
do you cast a vote — plea for
intercession
do you hasten your death by forgetting

do you close your eyes and believe
what others say you see

[January 9, 1982]

About this poem

I spoke this poem today at the Community Building for Alaska workshop sponsored by the Alaska Community Foundation & Alaska Pacific University, after a morning’s discussion. It’s not possible to walk together in community as anyone other than who we are, carrying our own minds, hearts, souls.

I wrote this poem many many years ago, mostly in my head, one day walking across my home town of Columbia Falls, Montana, & thinking about people who seem to need to have other people tell them what to think, what to believe — or even to know who they are. But how can you know who you are, unless you discover it for yourself? How can others know you unless you are yourself? How can any other person have the arrogance or violence of spirit to claim better knowledge of you than you have of yourself? To do so is a violation of your very integrity.

This is the second time I’ve posted this poem on my blog. The first time was on June 17, 2009, during the height of the public hearings on the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO-64. Much of the previous night’s testimony against AO-64 had reminded me of this poem, as did the sight of the numerous teenagers — kids on a teen mission from Mississippi Avenue Baptist Church of Aurora, Colorado — bused in by their host, the Anchorage Baptist Temple, to wave signs printed by the Alaska Family Council urging permitting continued discrimination against citizens of a different city in another state than they even lived, and in which their parents had no vote.  I wondered then, & still do, how many of these kids might themselves have been gay or lesbian, bisexual or trans, but couldn’t tell anyone, & fought earnestly inside themselves against their own integral beings because the adults in their lives taught them to distrust their own self-understandings.

Needless to say, ordinance supporters, including Anchorage LGBT youth, weren’t favorably impressed with kids from Colorado agitating against equal rights in Anchorage.