Bloomed
The streets where I grew up on was no place for the weak or disenfranchised to be
born. For just like the Venus fly trap it could eat you alive or crush your dreams. From the
time you awake until the sunrise in the east? The dessert fox was on the hunt, looking for an
easy meal to eat. This was no place for a single mother to raise a young boy into a man… if
she didn’t understand the laws of the dessert her boy, surely he would become the fox’s next
meal. No mercy or redemption for foolishness, weak or the meek, because the predators
here never seem to sleep. Blind bullets from the unknown took my best friend one hot
summer day as we played a game of hide and seek. All of his mothers dreams shattered and
derailed by a nameless bullet that took her only claim to a possible future president or the
next Martin Luther King. Don’t look so surprised about what I speak, it’s was the law of this
dessert from where we came from you see? Our tears were barely dry on our cheeks. and
the dirt that was placed on his coffin just last week was not even hard yet…as we laid his
estranged father into the ground the following week. Even my sister who once voted the high
school prom queen could escape the call of the foxes that beckon her in the night, as she
chases the white rock to easy her pain. Young sisters weaken bodies litter the desserts floor
as they fall victim to foxes never ending feeding frenzy on lost souls. Soulless young black
men stand on street corners both night and day in this place I call home… waging wars on
turfs and the colors that each other ware or just because of the color of their skin, but yet
they all hold no deeds in their hands for this land they claim. Firmly I do stand here today, a
black man who somehow managed to survive in that dessert to tell this tell of a flower
planted in a place where nothing very few flowers ever grow. People see me as I pass them
by on these urban streets, never knowing that I was a black rose that had bloomed…In a
dessert were only a few flowers ever reached full bloom.
Copyright © Jay Anderson-Taylor | Year Posted 2009
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