“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

                — William Faulkner

 

Each fall, they appear, along

with all the excessive ornament

of comic death—the plastic

skeletons, the pumpkin-faced

displays of fear and faux horror—

 

while out in the yards, on lawns,

sprout Styrofoam head stones

with cotton-batting webs and

spiders from the party store—

all the fakery in the face of death.

 

But from the trees, the cheap and easy

prop can hang, a white sheet,

head stuffed with cotton, two

black eyes, and rope at the neck—

they move even in a gentle wind.

 

Children playing before and

parents within suburban homes

know not or speak not of history,

but just add more candy to the dish,

more laughter at the hanging ghosts.

 

All too recently, even now

the real “strange fruit” still hangs

on bloody nights, torch-lit for terror,

that echoed once through Meeropol’s

words, through Holiday’s aching tones.

 

Some would die and be left roadside,

some dumped in the local creek,

some buried without mark but

found later, when revolting soil

shoved the evidence to sight.

 

Bravado came from drink and common

hate to the bubba-faced men with

reddened eyes and necks, who growled

in cracker-barrel backrooms, then

donned sheets and rode horses, later pick-ups

 

to break the peaceful night with fire

and rage—the white-clothed “priests”

from the demon cult of torturing death,

who shouted fury, sweated anger, grasping

their sacramental whips and ropes.

 

Mornings after, families anxious,

then anguished found what remained,

and the cries and threnodies rang

across hills and valleys—one more

sacrifice to be taken from a cross.

 

Elsewhere, wives of the angry

washed sweat and bleached blood

from the sacrilegious night robes,

as bubba-men grunted their meals,

returned to work under reddened sun.

 

 

Fathers, mothers, today, you should know

your child’s autumn laughter curses you

before those gagging ghosts, and no

confection can sweeten the guilt, no

bleach cleanse this long legacy of blood.

 

* Note: The original song “Strange Fruit” was written by activist/teacher Abel Meeropol in the 1930s. The Billie Holiday performances and recordings of the song, beginning in 1939, made it famous.

 

8816*

[St. Louis, MO — August 2014 and After]

Merely numbers, four numbers

in sequence, signifying any

number of possible meanings

merely numbers, the address

of a common house,

on an ordinary street where

mostly unknown people

live anonymous lives, strangers

even to those footsteps away—

it was nowhere till elsewhere

the man residing fired his gun,

policing the strangers

of another street of houses

with bricks like these, and

lawns as green as these, and so

a black man died in that street,

died for being young, perhaps

proud, certainly for being

black—and he lay on pavement

in his own cooling blood

in the sun of that hot August day

and the energy that had been

his breath became a storming wind

of shock and grief and fist-raised

angry protests, that some heard

as justice, and others as rage,

till more guns were drawn

and the armored blue waves

opposed and surrounded the storm

but could not silence the wind

                                                                                                                       

and back at 8816, one or two

writers or photographers paused

to see what mysteries hid behind

curtained windows and silent brick,

behind the closed and locked doors

or beneath the still-green grass

and the man packed up and moved,

so his erstwhile neighbors passed

and wondered what next, from where—

their rumors flowed daily, weekly

to flower fears even as the season

turned cold and the leaves fell—

by Halloween, the fire pits came out

and the children tricked for treats

and the parents followed brats

with beers, and stoked more fears—

“they’re coming some day, coming

with fire, and we need be ready,

alert and ready,” and more beers

brought foggy sleep to watchers,

and a couple dumped the embers,

they thought extinguished, into bins

where hours later the embers flared

and fired the house, residents barely

escaping with breath and the clothes

on their backs, and the burnt remnant

stood an epitaph through winter months—

armed and vigilant, they seek protection

from anyone appearing darkly different,

from the brown mower or the black

delivery man, the shadow of difference,

and they believe themselves protected

from those who do not look the same

                                                                                                                       

but who, in the shadowed night, will

protect us from protectors, and who,

God knows, protects them from themselves

* 8816 was the house number address of former police officer Darren Wilson who shot and killed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, on August 9, 2014.

Child, Do Not Be Sad

[For the Parents Afraid of History]

Child, do not be sad, do not

feel the weight of the past, of

the history of fault and moral failure.

Do not be sad at the fact

of ancestors, long ago, who seized

dark strangers on darker nights

and transported them, wave

by wave, through oceans of hell

and high water nightmares.

Do not be sad, child, at the

record of crimes that made fortunes

we can now enjoy, because we

stole lands and lives, committing

genocides on peoples seeming so different

they were not people to us.

No, child, do not mourn for suffering

souls, chained in ship holds

and sold at auctions, do not fret

at the thought of those shackled

wrists and ankles, where red-rusting

iron left its mark with redder blood.

Child, do not be sad that even now,

we live well and others do not—the poor

are with us always, says the book,

so poverty is the necessary evil

suffered by those, you and I know,

are less deserving of our god’s grace.

No, child, do not be troubled in dreams

of young, dark girls, raped in the night

or in the broad daylight, by haughty masters.

Child, be not sad, do not listen to

the histories, told sotto voce, by those

who rarely have had a voice, a place.

Child, be glad to have your desires

met tenfold when others long fruitlessly

for the merest scraps of hope.

Child, you are the one blessed, anointed

in the white light of the white mind,

that reveals your chosen path above

and beyond the many who lost or lose,

the many humbled by the weight of chains

and lash, the many who remain in terror

of a night filled with shadow men, once horsed,

but now in pick-ups and vans, guns raised,

saluting their raging race of white pride.

Child, do not be sad, for we will keep you

warmly held in the arms of ignorance,

innocent of knowledge, free of truth.