For Janice Mirikitani: An Invocation

Welcome to GLIDE Memorial Church Sunday Celebration. We Celebrate Life Here. That is our job and our joy. For our Ancestor Poet, Janice Mirikitani, I begin with a Blessing: And I use the word blessing, but if you hear invocation, collaboration, wish, hope, invest in you, hold you accountable, expect you, dream for you, walk through fire with you, support your vision, lead from behind you, consider you, recommend you, or put you in the middle of my altar, or astral project just to get to you, or gratitude for the work of the big bang of you — cool.

I just use blessing here— radically inclusive, unconditionally loving blessing, not to impose, but to let you know that I’m pooling my poetic and prophetic resources for you. And if you must call this blessing, “love,” to receive it, know that nothing is ever loveless or outside of love. Not your office. Not your position. Not your art practice. Not your condition, your diagnosis, your illness, not your family of blood and making, not your hopes, not your sexuality, not your economic status, not your gender, not your addiction, not your recovery, and oh, my people, not your life. Your life is never incompatible with Love. Love can only shape itself to receive the part of you or whole of you that reaches out to it. That’s all it can do.

So, reach for this blessing, beloved, reach. And if you must hear instead of blessing; spiritual, civic engagement, or first responder, or racial justice, or environmental justice, or safe injection site, or black trans lives organizing—if you must hear creative, prophetic, or social justice—if you must hear black or white, straight or gay, gainfully employed or woefully unemployed, incarcerated and unincarcerated, free or getting free, male or female, young or old, vulnerable or invincible, immunocompromised and immunocompetent—cool.

Today, there’s a blessing in it because you’re here, and in it.