The Sentencing
Sometimes you write something in a hurry, and it needs editing, and maybe expansion or reworking, but the dirty baby that it is still deserves a viewing and a clean diaper, so here it is. I don’t expect it to be loved by everyone; but then again, nothing ever is, really. Love is wonderful, if you can get it, but equity, even when it has to be frogwalked into being, means you have self-respect and boundaries that may have taken the contributions of a thousand ancestors to achieve. I don’t care if you love me. But treat me as your equal, or acknowledge your time is over.
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In your desire to take the natives from their native place,
full knowing you will always judge the difference of their face,
in your determination to make them look just like you,
but not too much, you know, enough, to pass in your purview,
to dress them up and force them to their knees in bullied piety…
well, that might seem okay to you, but it’s not right to me.
When you moved in and took the land from people who would share,
you only knew of ownership and dominance, despair;
where you came from you were the very bottom of the pole,
and so you raped and pillaged, and you lied, and killed, and stole,
until you had your subjugated tribes called civilized,
and all the opportunity to lord them that you prized.
But that was not enough, because you had a bigger goal:
a large ambition that would only be fueled with a toll
paid with the blood of others, taken from their native place,
full knowing you will always judge the difference of their face.
When finally by civil war and discord you were forced to set them free
you still did not see equals, and that isn’t right to me.
You kept pushing, you kept pushing, so you wouldn’t have to see
any sign of happiness or growth, or plain humanity
to reservations in the places that were least interesting to you
in backwaters and shotgun shacks and barren deserts, too;
you fought their education, their employment, who they wed,
you said that the only good ones were the ones that were dead.
You went back on each treaty, each agreement that you wrought
because you didn’t have respect for people that you’d bought
or people that you’d treated like the offal on your shoe
for generations acting towards them as if they’d wronged you.
You thought they had no freedom in a land you gained for free,
and the wrong of that is still wrong, it sure isn’t right to me.
You blocked their votes with Jim Crow and with gerrymandering,
you put a sign for you alone on, face it, everything
redlining cities, backs of buses, back doors, separate schools,
you wouldn’t even share your water, like a bunch of fools,
and even when you murdered them, or made them disappear,
you never made them go away. Look around you, they’re still here.
It’s time for you to face the fact that when you build a state
on the backs of people forced to linger in the third estate,
one day you will wake up and you won’t recognize the place,
full knowing you will always judge the difference of their face,
yet still you will at last pay due to all the debts unpaid;
responsibility is yours, and balance will be weighed.
© RCGA 2020