Thanksgiving Eve

Yes,
I know,

the first official Thanksgiving Day
was ordered to celebrate
the massacre of
700 Pequots
in 1637;

yes,
I feel

accountable to the dead
for eating too much every November,
thus joining the rush to hide behind
the legend of the feast 16 years earlier
in Plymouth
that is used these days
to screen us from
an ocean of blood;

yes,
i must balance

gratitude and shame
when I sit with family and friends
and look at a bounty
built on theft and genocide;

if I say no
to every contradiction
I face every day,

I will sit alone in a hermit’s cave
barely breathing for fear of hurting another,
spend the rest of my life in mourning
for every cruel act done in my name
and never try to see the glad faces
of those I love
as anything more than a lie.

So yes,
yes

to making a temple anew
from sharing bread with others; and
yes, yes to holding tight to the memory
of death in the fields around villages
burning like candles on the shore
of Long Island Sound;

yes
to believing

that while the past is alive
in every bite of every dish,
all I have is the present
and the hope that the future will be born
in a revolution rising
from injustice I do not forget;

in the remaking of myths
through truth applied as lesson,
and not as bludgeon.