Scream

I want to open up my mouth and never stop screaming. I want my life to be turned into a never-ending wail, a siren marking and mourning all the deadly pain that this world bears. I want to screech, I want to shout, I want a sound as clear as a bell tone to come out of me, shot through with the horror of this place, this country. I want to scream.

I want to scream through every second of the video of George Floyd’s murder. I want to scream as I hold the bleeding head of a black girl injured at the protest after. I want to scream over Amy’s 911 call. I want to scream for Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. I want to scream for them all, every name that is now a hashtag, every family with an empty place, every person traumatized again and again by the news, every mother teaching her children how to behave around cops, every father praying to come home each day. I’ll scream until the atmosphere runs out of oxygen.

I want to scream for every person who is still incarcerated during this pandemic, trapped as the virus ravages those inside the prison walls. I want to scream for every person whose symptoms are ignored, have always been ignored. I want to scream for those who couldn’t get tested, those who couldn’t get a hospital bed, those who can’t trust the hospitals and died at home instead. I want to stand and scream outside nursing homes and meat processing plants and by fields and in Amazon warehouses, all the places where humans are disposable. I want to pace in overflowing morgues and around mass graves, a living banshee conjured by these days we’re living in.

I want to scream at the gravesides of every missing and murdered Indigenous woman and girl.

I want to scream through each and every one of my days. I want to scream for the chaplains on the COVID ward. I want to scream for my Asian American friends who have walked home shaking from slurs that have been hurled at them. I want to scream for my partner, harassed while wearing a face covering. I want to scream for the woman trying and failing to cover up her bruises with makeup. I want to scream for the hungry who come back, asking why there’s no meat in our food pantry boxes. I want to scream for the people who have overdosed during the pandemic. I want to scream for the desperately lonely. I want to scream for myself.

I want to scream with all that I have. I want to reach down into this soil and scream along with the blood soaked into it. I want to be dropped through the centuries, screaming for each act of violence, screaming as if, somehow, the sound would awaken humanity within the oppressors and cause them to change their ways. I want to wail in the face of every person possessed by white supremacy, because a white woman’s screams are the only screams they hear.

I want to lose myself in the screaming. My throat is already raw from holding the screaming in. So many dead, so many lives ruined, generation after generation, that the only response is an undying wail and I long to voice it, to give myself over to it. God, let me scream. Let me weep and shriek. Perform a miracle on me, on my vocal cords and my lungs so that I can keep up the deafening despair until the reasons to scream are gone.

Find me in the scream, Holy One.

Enter into this pain and make it whole.

And when I am empty again, because I know you will give me the gift of being empty again, fill my lungs once more and let me breathe. Begin to teach me again tenderness of heart, and grace, and love. Stretch out my muscles and set my bones aright. Restore my voice and my mind. Steady my feet.

Send me out, so that I may teach others how to hear the screams, that we may all one day be whole.

Amen.