on Watts
The humid summer nights we sat there,
uncomfortable on sticking pews,
close in the bad light,
could not prepare us for the days we would sit
uncomfortable on tattered bus seats,
lie broken in the street,
could not prepare us for the mornings we would wake
to sirens and fire,
search among the rubble for our children.
You could not sing all those broken dawns.
The young soldiers across the way
sneered at you, smoked
their government-issue cigarettes,
patrolled the bloody streets.
The black stains on their shoulders
and their fists raised in salute
silenced your song.
A gunshot silenced your truth.
The young soldiers
fired the shops along the block where you died
the day after your funeral.
I wept and did not extinguish
the guttering torch in my hand.
Instead I knelt and prayed for them,
prayed that I would someday
walk without that stripe of hate
at my side.
That morning I washed my shoulders,
burned the black, red, green, and yellow,
and replaced the arrows
in my fist with a branch
and a pen and a flute.
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