What We Know

You revel in death and delight with your own savagery

How could you let us die and demand more than a dozen doweries

How could you not believe our lives deserve all the flowers

When you know our bodies and blood sustain the soil

Why must we ask to be heard

When our voice is our birth right

Categorically stripped down but cut up

Our faces, the skin and our kin

Beyond gravesites and mega churches

We have what they searched for

Sight unseen but never been untouched

We can’t stand the rain

We make it

Our hearts

power the lights

Our backs sustain these walls

We are not your fodder

Our children are sacrificed for your comfort

Tamir, Adam, Archer, Quesan, Tyree, Andre and Jorge

Our women are brutalized for your entertainment

Breonna, Deresha, Kisha, Jonnie, Angel, Helen, India, April, Alteria, Sahlah, Laranda, Korrin and Janet

Our men are imprisoned or murdered for your envy

Eric, Mumia, Leonard, Michael, Walter, Alton, George, Dontay, Alan, Oscar, Patrick, Jonathon, Philando and Freddie

Closer to the center and holder of the circle

Removed from impartiality and stripped of humanity

You think we don’t know

that the color of your actions don’t say go

Go to the source and protect our power

Rise against the machines

Rage and rested

loved fueled hands holding one another right

Star lined streets with warm cooked meals made

Families together through any weather

Streets with our steps made fairy dust filled footprints

Ancient wisdom as the common ground

Our hopes and dreams heralded as gold

Once unknown but now found

We won’t cower to this fascist twist

A tale of our cities and our streets

We won’t wait for you to strike and we won’t use your tricks

The biggest question that we have is

Isn’t why

Who?

When?

What and which

It’s

How long do you think we’ll let you keep us like this?