Buried, like grains of sand

Under tainted lands, too many

Were left with a face, erased

The trail of tears disappears, you see no trace

A wounded knee, trapped in a time and place

The blood from the massacre fills this space

No reservations, ****** was the case that saw no date

For generations, too many were victims of this hate

Too many children, were displaced

Forced, to embrace boarding schools

Where lessons of pain and anguish

Became the child’s native language

Where Acts of Removal remain blameless

Save the man, **** the native

Still feels like that’s where the white Christian aim is

A truth, that echoes into foreign worlds

From the cries of missing, murdered, women and girls

Sharing the same breath of hope, that turns grains of sand

Into diamonds and pearls

Under a year-round summer sky,
She sits her almond brown, mocha dipped, sun kissed melanin in elegance on the corner of NW 3rd avenue and 11th terrace
Longing, to be seen and heard like wrongfully imprisoned innocence
Sentenced to a life of silence. Locked, behind cemented walls of Domestic Violence

She sits, and every time I visit, she begins to shake to the rhythm of PTSD,
Causing words to quaver behind twitching lips
As she gathers enough strength to tell me, that she remembers
she remembers, the feeling of imprinted hands
Collapsing the walls of her trachea, impeding any oxygen she fights for
I…can’t…breathe, three words, that happen to be sharper
Than any man-made blade carved out of desperation

She remembers, the days when her neighbors
Would physically and emotionally degrade her, by profaning
the exterior of her sacred temple until the interior
of her soul feels inferior with abusive words like blight and colored
Before being pinned and slapped with federally funded acts
plagued with vague diction strengthening the hate
behind negative depictions of her children until they were faced with evictions

She remembers, the day she was *****, forcefully ran through with an interstate
Leaving survivors, to experience the long-term side effects
Of common economic depression caused by the perpetuation
of Eisenhower’s vision of systemic segregation

Building roads through middle class black owned businesses and homes
This is for her, who’s hips would sway to the rhythm
and blues of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday
Hoping the day will come when she can reclaim her name
The Harlem of the South, formerly known as Colored Town
Where dreams seem to be as barren as vacant lots

This is for her, because she continues to persevere in elegance
with her almond brown, mocha dipped, sun kissed melanin
This is for Overtown, so please do me a favor and watch your mouth
when you decide to come around NW 3rd avenue and 11 Terrace

Tell Gregory Porter

To find me on the corner

With a cam recorder next to a coroner,

Where blood stains engrave

The cities pavement.

Bodies left behind outlined

Just to outline the enslavement.

Do my actions reflect those of a pacifist

Or a white hand that lacks a black fist?

Take a look at the visual of my concentration;

Open casket,

Nose high, closed eyes,

Tears of the surprised,

During the wake of the given invitation.

The received information

Results in cultural separations,

A fight for rights and reparations.

Targets painted in red across the nation,

Were never hard to hit ‘cause

They were cornered by gentrification.

Death becomes a part of recreation.

Pops couldn’t hop the scotch

Because of his inability to cope.

And young necks remain engrained

Because every day they jumpin’ rope.

Scholars hoping when

The bell rings hell doesn’t sing

On the grounds where they play,

‘cause bodies sway where ever they lay

Stringed to a child’s swing.

So tell Gregory Porter

To find me on the corner

With a cam recorder next to a coroner,

‘cause the school system

Is a southern battle zone

Positioned over catacombs

Filled with black skin

Killed by those

That lack melanin

But the color of their ligaments and bones

Remain akin.