Nostalgia’s a nauseating
sickness
like four little girls
still trying to tear down the brick
painted on the sides
of their heads
Pocketbook scriptures still dangling
from underneath
their tongues
like a scorched covenant
under burned fingernails
still trying to get me to
remember
Truth be queasy
like first trimesters
be painful
like birth pains
I heard
a roll of thunder
and laughter more frightening
than decomposed bodies
at the bottom of bi-racial rivers
whispering
like the voice of Emmet
till when?
It asked me.
Before strings of voices erupted from some place
beyond the banks of the James River
from someplace before William Lynch’s arrival
somewhere marchin
stomping on my roots
somewhere printed on the back
of the forbidden fruit, I still
got between my teeth
a string of voices
sprung up
from the oppression
marching down the streets of Birmingham,
Chicago, Georgia, Mississippi, Harlem.
Willie Edwards,
James Chaney,
Michael Donald,
Michael Griffith,
Michael Brown,
Yusef Hawkins,
James Byrd Jr, and Trayvon Martin’s voices
sang hymns of “I told you so’s”
for my memories
like women giving birth
to still born children
Till when?
said Mr. Till.
Will you people continue to give birth
to death
still lying on the bed
of Martin’s dreams?
They sang with an authority
like rolling thunder
and butterflies in my stomach
like truth on top Moses mountain they sang
like earthquakes
cracking my memories into lynched question marks
they sang
like blood-thirsty whales behind slave ships
like ripping flesh
torn open
with Hebrew scriptures
in their veins
they sang
like diseases written into the sky
and prison chains
their voices roared
like a million I told you so’s they sang
like voices do
and they asked me a question
but their words
were few
Till when?
Screamed the segregated
Set-apart
and unequal lungs
of Emmett
Till when?
He sang.
Like the lyrics of Deuteronomy
carried up
Till when will Malcolm,
Booker T.
and Martin King
still dream
before
they wake up?
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