Resistance

In the Americas,
never peaceful,
neighbours
in paralysed cities,
dance around each other
and arrive at blows,
words of distance
and dissent;

The priest sneers,
the politician looks down,
look from pulpit and podium
on rambunctious citizenry,
every one an outcast
in choreographed rebellion,
in the untameable favelas,
baile funk, street-love
fights back against repression
and the straight lines
of contempt.

Music in the gutters
is the rain’s beat,
its rising in comeback,
in resistance,
and the warrior rain
is a haze in the sun,
on streets where love
is hatred evaporating,
where exuberance
is its own defiant song
and the mist of it
clings like a drug inhaled,
a tincture of healing
injected by every dancing step
on the streets’ stone, in places
outside the containment of walls,
where the air is all the people own
and their freedom is in it,
breathing.

© BH, 2020

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So, this week the Poetry24 word challenge was ‘rambunctious’. Surprisingly common in news items, it seems. I found something about supercilious rightist leaders frowning on their oppressed, great unwashed dancing defiance and carnival on their mean but exuberant streets. 

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News item:

‘Like a Scream of Resistance’: Rio’s Carnival in Bolsonaro’s Brazil
New York Times – 26 February 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/arts/rio-brazil-carnival-blocos.html

... an Evangelical pastor, have done little to hide their contempt for the rambunctious festivity that paralyzes much of the city during the peak of ...