If you hear her once you’ll never again forget the voice of Linda Joy Burke. She calls words out from their caves of sleep; she slaps them alive; she makes hymns out of longing; and she apprehends what is wrong, saying its name, for what it is— all this in lyric song. Poets through time have described the world’s suffering and Burke is in this tradition, taking the painful, and moving through to find language of clarity and strength. Words are just symbols. It takes passion and skill to make meaning, to transform and to liberate. -Grace Cavalieri
Performance poet, writer, percussionist and picture maker, Linda Joy Burke is a 2002 Distinguished Black Marylander Award recipient for Art from Towson University’s Office of Diversity, a 2004 Coca Cola Company/NFAA Distinguished Teacher in the Arts nominee, a 2004 Poetry for the People Baltimore Legacy Award recipient, a 2008 Fox 45 Champions of Courage nominee, and a 2013 Howard County Women’s Hall of Fame inductee. She is currently a contributing editor to Little Patuxent Review Literary and Art anthology and a Co-host with Laura Shovan and Ann Bracken of the Wilde Reading Series based in Columbia, Maryland.
Burke’s poetry, fiction, op-ed columns, reviews, profiles and feature stories have appeared in numerous publications including: The Little Patuxent Review, Obsidian II Black Literature in Review, Beltway: An On-Line Quarterly, Passager, Healing Design; Practical Feng Shui For Gracious Living, Thy Mothers’ Glass Poems for Mothers and Daughters, Gargoyle 54, When Divas Laugh: The Diva Squad Poetry Collective, Maryland Voices -the 9/11 Project, Poetry for Peace; An Anthology of Maryland Poets on War, Peace & Social Justice.
Her work can be experienced on her blogs Moods Minds and Multitudes, The Bird Talks Blog Too, and I Grew Up to Be the Neighborhood Nosey Lady - http://birdpoet2.tumblr.com, and her photo blog - or you can follow her on twitter @ljoybird – and on Instagram as Birdpoet.
For Carlotta Who Died at the Age of Twenty – A Soldier in Angola
We want our daughters to be able to
dance again, In firelight and moonglow.
We want them to pass their blood to fertile
ground through rites of passage,
rather than from the pressure of shrapnel
stopping their hearts.
We do not want to be here
merely to make the men laugh
or the boys to lick their lips and drip
obscenities on our breasts.
We do not want to bare down hard
in our bellies to have children born
into this loveless cruel world.
We want our light like aurora
like simmering heat
reflected from shafts of golden grain,
to come not from M16 and grenades
but from round tables filled with
fruit and brown bread and hands
not afraid of holding each other.
We want peace because we’re
tired of giving up our children to
orphanages and the stench in the fields
of gasoline burnings of week old flesh.
We want peace because
it’s been so long since we could
dance unafraid,
and we want so much
for our mother lands to heal.
Originally published in Obsidian II, Black Literature in Review, and When Divas Laugh.
Filaments
You try not to think of
them doing anything other
than the daily changes
subtle things like hair and clothes,
then more obvious things
like closing doors
once and for all on the
last grade, job, marriage,
and opening to the next
best thing, new love,
brighter day.
You try not to imagine
that someone
may careen and crash
or confuse them
til their heart breaks
or feel the need
to blow them away
or that their hands
may grasp for
things better left alone,
or that their psyche
would deceive them.
You try not to
think of them leaving,
constantly cull through
mental artifacts
suffocate.
You try to
remember the first minute
your eyes met,
try not to forget the last breath
block out the spiritless
You try to grasp
lingering filaments
dream forgiveness in signs
bargain for different endings
rearrange internal ancestor’s rooms
with each leaving - become more mortal.
Linda Joy Burke
February 15, 2009
Next to Nothing to Do
I
after praying
and candle light rituals
after anger, tears, speculations,
after finger pointing,
and calls for sanity,
after social media
unleashes its bytes
of how we see it,
before damage settles
in as change,
before grieving
grows numb and cold
evolution reveals a new
distraction for masses
wallowing in a
current angst.
II
That's how it is in this
tricked out
fast tracked
multi tasked America
- of lack of attention spans,
and jerry springer show
like impulse control.
We're a melting pot of
vehemence
seasoned with a
pungent desire
for the best thing yet.
III
we start off on the orb
as beings fixated
on a heart opening wide
life
and end up
facing off against
humans afflicted by
pernicious heart wounds
wars ensue
broken pieces of
hearts taint futures
damage spans generations
circles break
over the smallest insult
children die – children
die every day – every day
children will tell you
someone raises hands
raises guns, raises Cain
a child dies – every day
everywhere -
I’ve heard a child say
and there’s really
nothing we can
do about it
nothing to do.
Linda Joy Burke
December 18, 2013
Written in response to the shootings in Connecticut, and after viewing the following program on Frontline. The Interrupters.
Reasons to Pray
I
When I was 16
I lived in a dorm
with other castaway girls
whose lives were set
squarely on the slick
edge of wreckage.
We yearned for the
sweet sticky salve
of a honey kissed love
received instead a
a level spoon full of
“baby, baby please…
I promise I won’t leave…”
these
dirty old type lies
turned into some girl’s
sorrow song,
dripped
from lips of spent men
with no faces,
who freely
invaded the only spaces
that we could designate
as our own.
Inside
our minds our familial
lives were a disorganized
litany of thing gone wrong.
Where was the space
to be reborn?
Where do you go
when you will never
“belong” back home again?
II
I disappear
to where trees wait
where ancient aspen crowned with spritely
birds in the quiet of winter sway,
where the scramble of squirrels causes
a muffled crinkle of dead leaves to be music
where impressions in slick ice on a frozen pond
reveal my kind of lodestar
in the face of the looming presence
of things gone wrong -
I disappear to pray.
Linda Joy Burke
March to August 2017
Stockpiling Stones
It is in an un American culture
some say, to let these strangers in –
tantamount to original sin
proclaim self-righteous prime time preachers
whose unresolved pernicious heart wounds
justify them stockpiling stones.
Jesus hasn’t been around for a couple of
millennia or more to weigh in on
all these religious power plays -
and contrary to the whole resurrection plan,
the alchemical fog released In His name has
embodied the worst qualities of human nature.
Some would have you believe that
kindness and loving peace are for the weak
but the weak have learned how to deceive
evil – and shape something spiritual into
the struggle of their ancestral lines –
They coax exotic antidotes from gardens
with edges of perfumed scents
and delicate monarchs hovering
they cast spells into streams and tides
where everyone can see them but no one does,
they pray to open heart paths – for the
sake of their children and to honor the
brokenness of their elders,
their kindness is their forcefield
against the culture of stockpiling stones.
Linda Joy Burke
2/8/2017
© Linda Joy Burke, all rights reserved
Photo, © David Hobby
