06/03/2020
A community Poem for Ahmaud Arbery from NPR (https://www.npr.org/2020/05/27/862339935/running-for-your-life-a-community-poem-for-ahmaud-arbery)
Running For Your Life
What is the color of air?
Who owns the right to breathe?
Why are we so afraid of each other?
When will they come for the brown men I know and love?
What was his crime?
Is there justice for all In the land of the free?
Or only those who are
White like me?
What is the vaccine for this "pandemic"?
I wonder where my baby is?
Another
Black
Body
Shot.
White-hot hate
left its stain
on a blackened
Georgia road.
My country, 'tis of thee ... we must raise the skeletons
buried deep in our past,
1880
1890
1920
1990
2020
"Give it time," White Fragility says.
Nothing moves forward
until this hunting stops
a knife on our collective tongues
Please stop running
from the truth
and listen:
This death was everyone's fault.
This is on you, young America
We must accept the lingering shame and guilt,
the anger and mistrust inequality have instilled,
apologize for the damage commit to sow a future with humility.
While we await such a day,
Let us say your name:
Ahmaud Arbery,
Ahmaud Arbery,
Ahmaud Arbery.
I am sorry that we all know your name now;
That we will forget it far too soon.
I am sorry that the only song they know to sing for you is tragedy.
I am sorry that all I can do is write this poem
I am sorry that your life has become a metaphor:
a house being built, down the road,
He liked to mark its progress,
dream of building one himself,
Eyes shine through windows,
Like raccoons in the woods at night,
Their faces twisted, pink, and hot,
He knows these trees, and their strange fruit,
Of thee I sing.
after hatred's song is spilled
out into the streets
and across soft green lawns
it cannot be unsung
After bullet leaves chamber
it cannot be recalled
My heart rages for another mother's loss of her son
for the blindness
for the cover up
for the tears not enough to wet the graves
of so many lost for the sake of insanity:
a black babysitter caring for white children
a black professor opening his own front door
a young black woman sleeping in her own college lounge
a black teen knocking on a door to ask directions
his first words: Don't Be Afraid
a black boy jogging in the morning
There is an essential difference between running
and running for your life.
I remember my mother, the night
she got down on her hands and knees
on the frayed rug,
Tired of the facade of racial progress
Pain too hard to bear,
fists pumping out the beat,
"I can't take it anymore."
I don't fear the pick-up trucks
It's only the dogs sometimes, when there are two or more, and mean,
Who charge out onto the road, hair raised along their backs, barking and growling.
Coming up behind me.
Looking for a chance to bite.
My deepest fear is that I am black and that I will be murdered for it.
They are young men
simply going about their lives
Never, ever again, should a dream be deferred,
should a parent have to explain
Jim Crow still lives in the hearts and minds
of white men,
should a young man look over his shoulder
at a gun and run only to lose this race.
Never, ever AGAIN.
We do have a choice
and it is an easy choice.
We fight to rise above this sin
We fight to be a world of one
We fight for our humanity
because after leaves fall they cannot be reattached
to the tree
because broken hearts still beat
because Justice peeks her head
around the corner.
And hope the door doesn't slam.
For this latest community poem, NPR poet-in-residence Kwame Alexander sifted through more than 1,000 submissions reacting to the killing of Ahmaud Abrery and created a poem that speaks with one voice.
