Fighting Back: Poetry

Written by Maurice Brian Henderson

"Fighting Back"

Someone dying hear tonite
by gunshots or police brutality
Summoned tears and loud cries
will become hollered as wind chimes
that weather the storm

Colored Girls
Now push back
toward the violence that signify
ITS WINTER IN AMERICA
the abide within Godspell of 
Go Tell My People

Chained/Shackled/Bound
Harkening of No More Dying Hear
and the Resisting Arrest
of Near death experiences
laid down as burden 
to Say that the River Turns

These Colored Girls
otherwise/also/known as 
Bitches
Are No longer countless of the Unbroken
Endangered Species
and the America’s Most Wanted postcard signature lost
of Black Lives Matter

Colored Girls, Ladies, Women, Females
and their bodies
so often echoed in the chambers
of cradled robbed graveyards 
and tombstones
that soothe say/
a brilliance that resound
from the captivity
as the matters and fact finding
of Death be Not Proud
and the Souls looking Back
of wonder/years
arrested development

Resist
the Fighting Temptation
Unarmed/Arrested
Fortune Told Sequential of DOA 
(Dead On Arrival)
And the We Shall Not Be Moved
Assault/Say It Ain't So
Resist........
                   Resist.......
                                  Resist.......
                                              Resist..........

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Author’s Bio

Maurice Brian Henderson is a 1987 graduate of the Penn Publishing Institute and was a Van Pelt College House Graduate Fellow from 1989-1990. He has previously served as a Creative Writing Instructor for the Penn Upward Bound Program and as a Visiting Writer for the Gear-Up program at Kelly Writers House. His plays have been produced at Penn by the Black Arts League and the Rotunda Theater. His recent tenure at Penn was as an Adjunct Fellow and Community Scholar at the Center for Public Health Initiatives. Presently a member of Men of Color at Penn, he has written for several campus publications such as the Daily Pennsylvanian, Visions Magazine by Makuu: The Black Cultural Center, and The F-Word Magazine.

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Illustration: Alyssa Sliwa is an illustrator for The F-Word Magazine. She is majoring in Psychology and minoring in Fine Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.