La Profesora’s Word of the Week: Fastidious!
13 Monday Jul 2020
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Category Archives: Uncategorized
The 4th Day of July, 2020
04 Saturday Jul 2020
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Today is the 4th
And I will claim peace
As I pray to my God
That my angst will decrease
Today is the 4th
And today I still weigh
Whether protestations for equality
Will ever hold any sway
Today is the 4th
But what does that mean
When carotid chokeholds still murder
Unarmed Black and Brown dreams
Today is the 4th
A day for which many of my ancestors
Bravely and hopefully fought
While others of my progenitors
Were trafficked, sold, and bought
Today is the 4th
And I want so badly to sing
But notes of antiblackness
Still dampen Freedom’s ring
And people still feign ignorance
Don’t understand why they shouldn’t cheer and jeer “red skins”
Or why they should welcome “huddled masses”
Who dream to enter in
And further question anger from those who’ve had an overfill
Of decades of trauma beyond the 4th
That have made liberty unreal
However…
Today I WILL celebrate the 4th
Not for what it is, but for what could one day be
I will claim in faith and work
That we can all be free
In law and soul and spirit
We will strive for all-the-better
We must believe it’s possible
That we can craft and fashion and tether
A way that we might celebrate
A National July 4th
A Freedom Party
Genuinely
Together
Regina YC Garcia, July 4, 2020
Weary Word Song
26 Friday Jun 2020
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
Be Not Weary In Well Doing, BlackLivesMatter, COVID19, Justice for Elijah McClain, SocialJustice
I am weary of liturgies and requiems
I’ve written to still my soul
I am weary of emerging horrors
Perpetrated by blue hearts frozen cold
I am weary of watching my babies die
As they walk the halls of hate
As they run the streets of disdain and fear
As they dance through beguiling gates
As they are ambushed by dark spirits
Seeking release for anger and power
Shadowed in corners, prepared to pounce
Brown-bodied victims of the hour
I am weary of pouring love
And not returned the cup
I am weary of loose-lipped rhetoric
That promises “Things will change. Look up.”
I am weary of waiting on others
To decide that they will do right
My gut cannot absorb the lies
Cloaked in sugary melodies and light
I am weary of watching history repeat
Politicized plagues, unmasked and militarized streets
Fashioned nooses, licensed lynchings
Fickle help on legal benches
Tears that mourn for the opressors’ stone glory
Absolute feigned ignorance of our stories
I am weary of watching small gods strut
I am weary of crying “My God! What
would you have me to do?
Cast them down, Lord! Bring us through! “
We live in times with naked kings, and Subjects circle to let their praises ring
And right is wrong
And Evil drops the dance and song
At our feet
While we look for saviors
To orchestrate marvelous feats
And wear cloaks of perfection
So keen to live in protection
We become confused
And employ the anciently used
All or nothing familiar ruse
And flawed logic permits many to choose
Yea, choose the enemy or downright refuse
To engage in our own escape…
I am weary
I am weary
And my words, on their own, are not enough
Regina YC Garcia
Celebrating Juneteenth 2020
19 Friday Jun 2020
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So on today, I just want to stop and reflect on the concept of “freedom” as it exists in this land, particularly with the boundaries of the United States. On June 19, 1865, approximately 2 1/2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was given, the word regarding the freedoms that had been established on January 1, 1863 finally reached Texas. This, as it relates to the physical freedom from bondage, is the date that those, who were once counted as 3/4 human, were no longer required to toil on plantations, within homes, or anywhere else within the United States without pay. The awareness of this commemoration, in recent years, has become a celebrated occurrence even outside of the state of Texas, as many around the United States continue to ponder and insist on ever increasing freedoms, equity, and equality for all. Therefore, it is fitting that we celebrate what has happened, as well as consider what needs to happen in order that we might better dwell in peace, prosperity, freedom, and unity.
For more on the history of Juneteenth, check out the following link: https://www.juneteenth.com/history.htm
Music for a Movement
La Profesora voices "The People Could Fly" by Virginia Hamilton – Word By Fire!
A Black History Month "Family Stories" Special!
For Those in the Struggle: Juneteenth Edition
Listen
All ye people
Who are from peoples
Who’ve come from earth and bone
Who have worn sackcloth and ashes
Ye and they who are full of blood
And salted water
That stream from the most convenient
Orifices
Lest ye think that the struggle is
Yours
Alone
Look around
At the flesh that surrounds
And know that we struggle together
For some among you will lead
And some will be led
As our ancestors were
Along the Ivory Coasts
In Jewish Ghettos
In Roman Prisons
Labor Camps
Internment Camps
Death Camps
In the Dens of Lions
Or lying with the enemy
They/We that struggle
And live
And die
And rise again
Today I think of one people
Who were in a struggle
A great fight
To stay Free
And then
To stay alive
And then
To win a war
And then
To survive the faux freedom
Inflicted by another people who struggled with
The fear of the newly falsely freed
Tied them to trees
Brought to their knees
For an eternity
Until
The Divinity who saw the weeping and gnashing
Mixed up a recipe for men and women
Who seek to rescue and free other men and women and themselves (simultaneously keepers and liberators)
A New Movement of People
Who know that they
Are not greater that the
Divinity who made them
But through Powerful Divinity
They/We, those of us concerned with freedom from brutality and withheld equality
Those who see the importance of Equity
For those lacking the privilege that allows others to see
Full life and liberty
Still seek to alter the struggle
Of those whose spirits are distended
From the malnourishment of a diet lacking in justice
Replete in exclusion and isolation from the Dream
of all those who struggle, struggle to achieve
And lest ye flesh weary souls
Sick with the rejoicing of the victory forget
The captivation, humiliation, emancipation, no forty acres
(Just an observation)
Segregation, degradation, King’s motivation, some integration,
Lyrical, spherical, academic, vocational amalgamation
Lest ye forget
Forgetting creates a monster which is blind in its strike
Unbiased in its venomous bite
Despises the yellow, brown, black, and white
Cloaks in the tapestry of intemperate thought and speech
I must stop before I say what I cannot…
For all in the struggle
Learn from the struggle
Of all
Lest you struggle
In vain
Regina YC Garcia, Juneteenth 2020
And God Said…
18 Thursday Jun 2020
Posted in Uncategorized
You don’t have to speak my language for me to love you. You don’t have to worship as I do for me to love you. You don’t have to be my shade, racial mixture, ethnicity, nationality for me to love you. You don’t have to love as I love for me to love you. You don’t have to be like me or like mine for me to love you.
I just have to love you.
A Start…
I see you trying while we’re dying
Weaving back and forth between the phrases
Your mouth may have never felt compelled to form until now
Wanting to say the right thing
(It is a start)
But when it comes out
Your flesh struggles to separate the years of “no need” from the apologies of the new day
Words fumble and jumble, and the need to protect your fear slides in to lessen the impact of your attempts
As well as the wind it took to push it forward
Your message received, but the relief flees when
Your words are regurgitated in the mouths of those who have believed
That it was awkward, unenlightened, insincere…
Those who have anxiously waited to believe that your years of disdain and flawed perceptions had totally shifted
While they were dying for change even as they buried their dead
Between tears and fatigue, they dwell on what you said
Analyzed and sighed that you still “don’t get it”
I see you, though
(It’s a start)
Keep going, and
Listen to the small voice that you’ve avoided
The one that buckles you in guilt and shame
Lean into its presence
It will give you what to say
It will tell you what to do
It will keep you from walking away
(It is a start)
This conciliation is for us all
It has to happen lest we all tumble and fall
If that be the case, we shall do nothing
Except hit the wall
So keep going
Keep trying
Yea, as we fight to stop
All of our dying
Hallowed Be Thy Name
14 Sunday Jun 2020
Posted in Uncategorized
Hallowed Grounds: Sacred Sites of African American Memory
Hallowed Be Thy Name…
In my mind, there are sacred sites of striding and struggling
Striations of strain and strength
In memories I once lived and those I inherited, I marvel at how they and I “made it over,” as if I floated in on the broken but braced backs of a superhuman ancestral brood…
For how on earth, Heaven, or hell could I have moved clay lips to laugh, lie, cry, love, preen, protest, speak life, and dodge death…
And I’ve come to realize that these sanctified places of terror, trial, and triumph are ordered in my thoughts, a reminder that true freedom is always bought with a price of great sacrifice and and justified only through an ointment of redemption
And so the Spirit moved among these places
Gave a massaging message while they were moaning while in manacles
Hallowed be thy name…
Inspired their holy dance while in deprivation
Hallowed be thy name…
Gilded the Grace that would carry them
Hallowed be thy name…
Answered prayers whispered only in their thoughts
Hallowed be thy name…
Cloistered me in an ancestral seed
Hallowed be thy name…
Birthed me on a bank of better
Hallowed be thy name
Reined in my reckless
Hallowed be thy name
Gave me strength to fight the feckless
Hallowed be thy name…
The Spirit has moved in many times and places, yet today can be seen in faces of those who know in their hearts that they are but a small part of a greater plan and can still cry “Hallowed be thy name…” in wholly fickle lands
Regina Yvette Carter Garcia
I am Regina Yvette Carter Garcia, daughter of Evelyn Jean Simpson Carter, daughter of Bessie Lee Teel Adams Simpson, daughter of Carrie Teel Adams, daughter of Margaret Carroway Teel, daughter of Cinda Woolard Carraway.
A powerful lesson that my grandmother Bessie Simpson taught me during a time that I was having a crisis of faith was that whatever I believed had to be something that I knew for myself. I needed to be able to see it proven in my life. She never told me that I had to believe what other people told me, to believe one ideology or another, but to believe what I saw working in my own life. Then she shared her testimony with me. It rocked my world! As I applied and tested, my faith in my Divine Power grew stronger…Everyday, I praise my God for who and what she was in my life.
On Moldy Minds and Mal-Intended Monuments…
10 Wednesday Jun 2020
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
Change, Confederate Monuments, Racial Intimidation, Racism, Relics of Racism, Social Justice, Unity
In Those Old Temples
I hear there is fear
Those who desire to stay
And even watch some be slayed
From the comfort of their chairs
Saying there are “bigger fish to fry”
Than a rock, a piece of stone, let alone
Should anyone risk life, limb, or reputation
Trying to remove the bastions of our “Southern Nation”
That repressive obsessive Confederation
Never moving foot nor fingers nor pen to protest
In those old temples
Mouths form and rhetoric spills
Wrapped in ideas, overly pedantic and frantic
Expressing the fear
of what one word beyond the status quo will mean
Frightened by revolutionary freedom fighters and Tiki Torcher dreams
Glued to couches and computers focused on screens
And overly concerned about what this insistence means
And what friends will think from post, comment, or like
Lurking silently, watching the gory
Existing in a land of double-minded glory
In stasis, hopefully never to be perceived as liberal revolutionary or racist
Sitting in those old temples
Afraid that the upheaval of the believers will create a confusion
Based on the conclusion that a collusion of ideas
Will tear down some peaceful salvation
But salvation cannot exist with justice
Especially if the justice to be had is not withheld from everyone-Just Us
In those old temples
There is a fate worse than death
It is the sacrifice of a brilliant afterlife
All because we couldn’t love each other enough to stomp out each other’s strife
So in a New Temple of Societal Sanctification
Fear and these manmade monuments must die
For in the words of my elders, “God can’t use no coward soldiers”
And we all have gifts enough to spare to make this world aware
After the dust settles
In a New Temple…
These monuments must lift up
Reformed, Repurposed, Re-stationed
So that my God, creator of all mankind, can show us a new nation
In a New Temple…
Therefore I am charged to walk in my calling, as you are in yours
Daughter of Griots and Healers
Born from empathic feelers
Down through generations
From both those who received and offered degradation
In a New Temple…
We come
Prophets offering
Truth and pointing towards redemption
Whispering Incantations of inspiration
Rituals to rise
Pouring sweet libations
As we melt down Hate’s desperate cry
In a New Temple…
We moan a litany of love
Poured from our lips over
Monuments of stone
And rigid concrete minds
Those that force us into dark corners, all alone
In a New Temple…
Those mausoleums in human form
That were built and maintained from fear and formed to despise
Me, any of my brothers, my sisters, my family, my friends, mankind
Who have screamed out “I matter! We matter”
And wallowed in vain
Will finally feel a valued part of the land in which they remain
In our New Temple
We grind down ashen rock into into dust
And then love it back together
Shaped in renewed mind and spirit
A picture of forever
In the New Temple
We dream it
We speak it
We walk it
We believe it
We protest it
We contest it
We pray for it
We live it
Go down, broken clay pot
And arise again
Something different
Something new
New legacy of freedom, justice, equality, unity
We protest until you do
We protest until you do
Regina YC Garcia
Word By Fire
07 Sunday Jun 2020
Posted in Uncategorized
La Profesora voices "The People Could Fly" by Virginia Hamilton – Word By Fire!
A Black History Month "Family Stories" Special!
La Profesora voices "The People Could Fly" by Virginia Hamilton – Word By Fire!
A Black History Month "Family Stories" Special!
On Flesh Temples of Self Loathing…
07 Sunday Jun 2020
Posted in Uncategorized
Okay…(breathe)
I know that I am at least one day late and about $5 short in regards to a weigh in on Candace Owens. A few reasons for that, the primary one being is that I didn’t know who she was. My faith system doesn’t carry me in her direction. I don’t know her mama an’ nem, and I don’t watch much religious media programming. My spirit can’t roll with all of the masked agendas. However, since I had more than one person inquire regarding my thoughts, I decided that I needed to go back and watch her video so that I can speak intelligently.
🙄
I don’t even quite know how to begin except to say that hearing her say George Floyd was not an “amazing” person, to hear her indicate the black community panders to the “least common denominators” within their communities made my stomach turn, and that, outside of anything else she has to say, tells me these things:
- She is not to be taken as a spokesperson for the black community. This is not because she is not black. Certainly she is.
However, she is not adept at explaining the black condition. Why this is the case, I can’t explain with certainty. Perhaps she is operating in a shame of black association. I don’t know her childhood, her experiences, her rejections. I’m not sure if she, on occasion bore the “Oreo” label (Smart kids, that’s a tough label. I know. I’m good, though). I don’t know if she is taking out her revenge on some culture of poverty that she escaped by flinging around a “bootstrap mentality.” I’m not even sure if she is emotionally repaying someone who insists (overtly or implied) that she continue the oppressive narrative of the generational carriers of the colonizers’ mindset. I don’t know what promises or gold stars await that would prompt or enable her to condemn the situationally unarmed incapacitated dead.
- Conversely, I don’t know who accepted her in her development, whether the acceptances were conditional or unconditional. I’m not sure if someone or someone(s) told her, showed her, or implied that if she promoted the narrative of the racially-based class apologists she could get a pass that would propel her up the structure.
- All I know is that some itching ears were just waiting to have an excuse to ignore the societal imperative of equality, equity, and protection under the law, as well as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all people, in particular black and brown people carelessly “handled” by those within the government and justice systems.
Some of them who waited call themselves Christians. They were waiting to hear from other folks who call themselves Christian to give them a Christian word, as opposed to looking at what the teachings of Christianity espouse.
They were waiting, and then…
She handed them a box of bullets.
Bless her heart.
All that I know is that the Bible consistently conveys that “we are our brother’s keeper,” “not one is without sin,” “all praises belong to God,” “all flesh is grass.”
All that I know is that none of us is “amazing” all of the time.
All I know is that we need to stop looking for reasons not to treat each other right.
All that I know is that idol gods take many forms.
All I know is that worshipers of self abound and tear down.
All I know is that the meek matter, the oppressed matter, the poor matter, the caged matter, and…
Black Lives Matter!
I’m telling you this because I want you to get it right, whoever you are because #YouMatter
Come on now! You better let God into your heart.
You know. Real God.
❤
Black Thought…
Just a thought…a Black thought…my Black thought
What if Black was unconfined,
Not restricted, soul, body, and mind?
And what if Black could see itself
With all of its glory waving, issues unshelved?
And what if Black could escape the box
The one with all the indiscernible locks
And whisper chains secured ’round maintained by those yet free and those still bound by those without and those within, jailers and wailers, sanctified and full of sin, standing close and afar while they moan and grin?
What if the flesh asylums fall,
the ones built to keep Black beyond the wall?
What if every Black Gift ignite
Oh what a sight! What a sight
That would be!
If Black could give creativity free
And still could live life unfettered?
Oh peace be!
Slay the flesh!
Find the key!
Regina YC Garcia
Word By Fire
06 Saturday Jun 2020
Posted in Uncategorized
Trailer for Season 1 of Word by Fire!
In the time of revolution, empty words and promises create convolution. La Profesora is finding her space to add breath to revelation in order to evaluate and contemplate a solution to the wrath, injustice, and confusion!
When relevant commentary and poetry meet the air, Embrace The Fire!
La Profesora's Pen 