Black and brown bodies
Have been desecrated,
Sacred structures
Have been desecrated,
Democracy
Has been desecrated,
By hungry hands,
Seizing power,
From lives, minds, hearts,
It is taken,
To feed a machine,
That converts likes
Into hateful rhetoric,
That converts hateful rhetoric
Into costed lives,
We stand on stolen ground,
Watered with the blood and tears
Of ancestors,
Who could see but not fully know
The scope of all,
Of what really was,
Or was to come,
We stand because our forebears fought
For the right to stand shoulder to shoulder,
To link hands,
In community of giddy multitude,
That makes the powerful quake,
We stand because
We have been desecrated,
And justice
Is the only salve
For these wounds.
Tag: Racism
Damned Woes
My heart it hangs low
From so many damned woes,
My soul it thus bleeds
Incarceration
Your glory
Is tangled up with my fear,
Is cast from the cuffs on people my color,
I hurt knowing this is how you think
Justice looks,
I would implore you
To look again,
But I realize there are blinders
That would prevent you
From seeing things like me,
I don’t want to make your mind like mine,
I just wish you could see,
The invisible ink that’s colored
A corrupted system,
In its very design,
I fear the locked doors,
Because in this system,
It would not be hard
For one of them to be mine.
Cutting Hair & Other Tales
As they cut her hair,
Did they know their legacy?
Surely not,
Though it’s ingrained in everything
They’ve ever been taught,
Implicit and explicit,
Did they feel the weight of each lock,
As it fell to the floor?
The weight of feet torn from land,
Land torn from feet;
Of shackles and brands;
Of false emancipation;
Of separate but “equal”;
Of jumpin’ Jim Crow;
Of rope;
Of crosses, burning and imposed;
Of color blind racism;
Of a new apartheid;
Of always being an alien
In a land deemed ones own?
No.
Of course they didn’t feel it,
Even if they knew it,
They’ll never have such weight to bare,
The racial contract has made it so,
And on and on the story goes,
Adding another lesson to the tales,
This 3 white boys
Who cut the young black girl’s hair.
The Illusion
There has been a crack
In me
And I am open,
Yoke exposed,
I am taking in, taking on, trying on
The world in ways I’ve never before seen,
And I am aware of
The illusion in which we swim,
I am aware,
And tempted to scream it from the mountain tops,
But that is not my mission,
I thought knowledge was,
My mission involves learning
To swim through the illusion in a different way,
I have not found out yet how,
But I am open,
Finding pieces of my broken shell,
And reassembling self,
Equipping for this mission,
To be in and of the world,
To simultaneously see, not see, taste, touch, and transform the illusion.
Alabaster Anger
My thoughts and prayers are held captive,
By a sickness,
An ailment that will never be named
Though it’s alabaster anger
Terrorises our days,
we can do nothing but weep,
As we think,
And pray
She of Letters 