Caged canary - Marilyn Buck

We are free.

We take it for granted - we might have complaints and constraints but still we are free to the extent to be called FREE. At least I always believed freedom was something so basic that it was free.

Then I read about a person Marilyn Buck.  When Marilyn Buck died last August 3, she had lived outside prison, on parole, for only twenty days. At age sixty-two, she had spent her last twenty-five years in various maximum security prisons. Before that, she lived years underground, supporting and taking part in actions with the Black Panther Party and later, the Black Liberation Army. Marilyn was a white woman who carried a great deal of pain, most of which came from her unflinching acknowledgement of the centuries of untold inequities suffered by African Americans and other people of color at the hands of “freedom-loving” white America.

I can't judge if it was right or wrong or I am not taking sides. Am not preaching here anything not even a point of view but for a second think this - a person spent almost whole of her life behind the bars and for what ? Some crimes - I let people decide what were the crimes and how much they mattered.

Let's not judge some one for a second. Can we at least grant her this freedom? An accomplished poet and translator this is probably her best poem. [This poem is read on the CD by Marilyn Buck. ]

Wild Poppies

I remember red poppies, wild behind the school house
I didn’t want to be there, but I loved to watch the poppies

I used to sit in the window of my room, sketching charcoal trees
what happened to those magnolia trees, to that girl?

I went off to college, escaped my father’s thunderstorms
Berkeley. Rebellion. Exhilaration!

the Vietnam war, Black Power, Che took me to Chicago
midnight lights under Wacker Dr. Uptown. South Side. Slapped
by self-determination for taking Freedom Wall photos
      without asking

on to California, driving at 3:00 in the morning in the mountains,
I got it: what self-determination means
A daunting task for a young white woman, I was humbled
      practice is concrete … harder than crystal-dream concepts

San Francisco, on the front steps at Fulton St.
smoking reefer, drinking “bitterdog” with Black Panthers and white
hippie radicals, talking about when the revolution comes

the revolution did not come. Fred Bennett was missing
we learned he’d been found: ashes, bones, a wedding ring
but later there was Assata’s freedom smile

then I was captured, locked into a cell of sewer water
spirit deflated. I survived, carried on, glad to be
like a weed, a wild red poppy,
rooted in life

Read more about her here : http://www.marilynbuck.com/