The Bridge Poem 
by Donna Kate Rushin 
 
 
From This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color by Cherrie Moraga & Gloria Anzaldua, New York:  Kitchen Table Press, 1983.
 [Currently out of print; I recommend trying Diana Dominguez, Bookseller to find a good used copy.]
 
 
 
 
    
 
 
I’ve had enough 
I’m sick of seeing and touching 
Both sides of things 
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody 

Nobody 
Can talk to anybody 
Without me 
Right? 

I explain my mother to my father 
my father to my little sister 
My little sister to my brother 
my brother to the white feminists 
The white feminists to the Black church folks 
the Black church folks to the ex-hippies 
the ex-hippies to the Black separatists 
the Black separatists to the artists 
the artists to my friends’ parents… 

Then 
I’ve got to explain myself 
To everybody 

I do more translating 
Than the Gawdamn U.N. 

Forget it 
I’m sick of it. 

I’m sick of filling in your gaps 

Sick of being your insurance against 
the isolation of your self-imposed limitations 

Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners 

Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches 

Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people 

Find another connection to the rest of the world 
Find something else to make you legitimate 
Find some other way to be political and hip 

I will not be the bridge to your womanhood 
Your manhood 
Your humanness 

I’m sick of reminding you not to 
Close off too tight for too long 

I’m sick of mediating with your worst self 
On behalf of your better selves 

I am sick 
Of having to remind you 
To breathe 
Before you suffocate 
Your own fool self 

Forget it 
Stretch or drown 
Evolve or die 

The bridge I must be 
Is the bridge to my own power 
I must translate 
My own fears 
Mediate 
My own weaknesses 

I must be the bridge to nowhere 
But my true self 
And then 
I will be useful 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Poem For The Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, An Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe In 
The War Between Races 
by Lorna Dee
Cervantes 
 
 
 
 
 
Reprinted from Emplumada, a collection of poetry by Lorna Dee Cervantes, printed by University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981. It was Lorna Dee's first book and received a 1982 American Book award. Her poems include thoughts on growing up in Mexican-American communities in the San Jose/Santa Clara Valley area of Northern California. Two poems, "Freeway 280" and "Beneath the Shadow of a Freeway" document the loss/destruction of historica Chicano neighborhoods for the building of the 280 freeway. 
Chicana/o literary critic Jose David Saldivar wrote about her work, "No book has so successfully made the California urban and rural worlds of unfinished  freeways and 'spinached specked shoes' of cannery workers come alive. No book has so carefully elucidated what living as a Chicana in the West means.... Emplumada offers a number of troubled and delicate portraits of a woman's world and how that antipatriarchal world has come to have meaning
 
 
 
 
 		 In my land there are no distinctions. 
The barbed wire politics of oppression 
have been torn down long ago. The only reminder 
of past battles, lost or won, is a slight 
rutting in the fertile fields. 

In my land 
people write poems about love, 
full of nothing but contented childlike syllables. 
Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps. 
There are no boundaries. 
There is no hunger, no 
complicated famine or greed. 

I am not a revolutionary. 
I don't even like political poems. 
Do you think I can believe in a war between races? 
I can deny it. I can forget about it 
when I'm safe, 
living on my own continent of harmony 
and home, but I am not 
there. 

I believe in revolution 
because everywhere the crosses are burning, 
sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner, 
there are snipers in the schools... 
(I know you don't believe this. 
You think this is nothing 
but faddish exaggeration. But they 
are not shooting at you.) 

I'm marked by the color of my skin. 
The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly. 
They are aiming at my children. 
These are facts. 
Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my 
"excuse me" tongue, and this 
nagging preoccupation 
with the feeling of not being good enough. 

These bullets bury deeper than logic. 
Racism is not intellectual. 
I can not reason these scars away. 

Outside my door 
there is a real enemy 
who hates me. 

I am a poet 
who yearns to dance on rooftops, 
to whisper delicate lines about joy 
and the blessings of human understanding. 
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and 
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn't fade out 
the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage. 
My own days bring me slaps on the face. 
Every day I am deluged with reminders 
that this is not 
my land 

and this is my land. 

I do not believe in the war between races 

but in this country 
there is war. 
 

 
 
 
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