Many Blind Eyes
A mother of swirling black smoke bore you
Bundled in burlap
Atop burning earth's dust bowl.
Before you
A life of sweat tainted tobacco leaves and cotton bales
Shrouded in tight braids of hate's acrid air.
While above...
Only your father's cries of mercy
Filled the grit dense clouds,
As Jim Crow rode the thunder,
Looking down to make more the same,
More swaddling to construe miscreant.
Still
Painfully
Some of us peering skyward at earth’s rotunda
And considering history,
Observe many bigoted souls gazing through dulled lenses
Seeing not stars sparkling.
We remind ourselves
The past always sends forward its remains
To be a haunting presence,
Helping us see
What we are truly looking at…
As long as there is hatred and mistrust of our fellow human beings, just like us, there will be inequity, in spite of the hypocrisy of holding up tokens as though they were enough compensation for what we have done.
The new code word for hiding the past from history is called, woke. But it's out there, readily available--true history. And anyone can now see what we've done to ourselves by continuing hatred instead of giving a hand up.
Ron