a riot is a prayer is a maybe is a yes— (in praise of refusal, of the dark, of “yes;” in praise of every unknown regarding the world to be born)
& every fire set a small “perhaps,” each smoke billow a letter to god. Watching flames bloom in a city like mine, I think of the birth of the world. I think of the wild, gentle yes breathed by the seed waking blind & new in the earth, its ecstatic faith bursting suddenly in the dark— “yes”— it blooms for its own blessed sake, becoming in the name of “perhaps”.
We are aware of the story of the universe up until one trillionth of a second following something called the Big Bang, and in those moments before, we accept some unknowable Nothing— the black cradle of all possible swelling in the throat of the heavens until, at last, it simply had to Become. No quarterly timeline, no outcomes to record for next fiscal year’s grant writing, No. Only refusal, only yes— a flash in the dark refusing not to Be, and then, there Was. Hope is a flash in the dark, despite & again. Black is a beginning. Let us lift up all of the brilliant and holy refusals carried out by all of the no-named self-crowned so-called “Nothings” of the world— black and Black and all eternal. Let us proclaim ourselves All Possible, a Great & Unknowable Nothing, and let we with the dawn in our throats claim our bloodright in that lineage of Black geneses. We give birth with our refusal. We bow to burning cities, we pray with the light of a match: “yes, perhaps, today, at last.” (and indeed, one dawn, there Is.)
