The Lynchings On Fox News
I’ve seen black sheep set in Pongola grass
Within pallid seas, differed,
Like black buttons on a white cotton suit;
Sheep are color blind.
A bee is fine-looking,
But there’s fire in its ass.
Can the wild goat trust
The adder with inviting pelt?
Did Emmitt Till paint changes
With his blood in cotton picking towns;
The blood that called from Mississippi,
Like Abel’s blood calling from the ground.
Death had a voice, a voice in the wind,
The wind that walked north-west
And brought a microscope
For John Public to see
How inferior to dogs we are.
As a child, I played
Ring-around-the-roses
Until I saw “Rosewood”
And heard the drums
Beaten like Rodney King,
And the heartbeat of Cojoe
And Nanny racing
Towards the mountain of the devil,
To escape the cotton fields.
The drums are always talking.
The old south is alive and kicking high.
This is no Elvis tale. Exhume the body,
See with your own eyeballs.
No DNA can confirm
That Jim Crow is dead.
Jim Crow has a roost on Fox News.
He’s always crowing,
Whipped up by the “boy”
In the WHITE house.
How much can you see
If you look from the outside?
I’ve seen it even in REM sleep,
Even when I dream of roasted breadfruit,
Jockato in coconut milk, and Chinese geisha;
Willie Lynch is a man breathing
The smog-filled air in Washington.
In 1955, Money was the root of the evil,
And ’68 Memphis was the cross
Of the sacrificial lamb,
But these days men are lynched
In broad day light.
String up, dangling
Like papa's khakis floating
In breeze walking the orange glen.
All eyes should see our opinion of them.
Today we’re civilize,
And Catholicism is not voodoo.
We no longer use rope,
Our tongues do a fine job.
Like Mutabaruka,
I have no color problem;
Everything is black to me,
As black as Sarah’s view of the motherland
(It’s not too vital for her to learn).
If blue skies
Cried acid,
And wash the dark color
From this portrait,
I would still be black,
As black as tar.
It’s in my blood.
Copyright © Earle Brown | Year Posted 2012
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