Streets of New Orleans

Morning Star falling from the sky
Babies crying
Mother’s running
Where is God! Where is God?
While the waters rise from the gutters.
Never again by water it was said
But two hundred thousand are dead
And then another ten thousand more
And little girls raped while they wait for rescue.

We didn’t know who was among us
We didn’t know the mist would rise
And the sky cloud over with holocaust.
Everything is lost
And the land of the free became a sea
Of third-world faces washed in a flood...
For…God remembered.
Twenty-five December' prayers carry little weight
When fate points a finger on the left hand of death.
Quiet as its kept Black and white and yellow folk
  Die pretty much the same
Screaming for God to come...gasping for breath....
Sepia on Kodak flashing final scenes...
And petitions for reconsideration nullified.

There once was a city that is no more
And the books will show
And the stories they tell one thousand years hence
Will neither sense the stare and the glare
In the eyes of those dying in the street of New Orleans
The queens and the goblins silenced.

                                        Billye Okera
                                          ©July 5, 2005