by BAR Poet-in-Residence Raymond Nat Turner
When our giants go down, our spines must straighten up and create new beginnings.
Redouble our efforts…
(For Robert Knight, Chokwe, Amiri,
And others known and less known…)
by BAR Poet-in-Residence Raymond Nat Turner
When our Knights are captured
Or fall on battlefields, as they
Surely must, and we lose their
Brilliant lights and we are
Scrambling to pry pens,
Swords, spears, bread and
Roses from stainless steel
Grips of their icy hands—
Scrambling to hoist our
Fallen banners, temporarily
Mired in mud and blood,
Even higher, scrambling
To staunch rivulets of
Brine from our sweetly
Shattered hearts…
When our giants — in
All sizes — go down,
Our spines straighten
Honoring, immortalizing,
Their legends, burnished
Names, by divvying up
Cosmic, ancient, work
Creating them in the
Beginning…
Raymond Nat Turner © 2014 All Rights Reserved
Even in the era of the “African-American” tag, there’s no shaking black – because James Brown made it cool to be black.
It appears that lies and/or false narratives are being used to rationalize this latest heinous act that may also result in another senseless war.
Had WikiLeaks existed in 2002, a patriotic officer like Chelsea Manning might have leaked the official intelligence reports and stopped a war.
Trump wants to “surge” against urban Black and brown Americans in the same way that the US surged against Iraq and Afghanistan.
The film is either “a meditation on a system of justice that treats innocent people as outlaws,” or “a bourgeois representation of the struggle against police oppression.”
