Continuum

“Attend the remarkable providence
issuing under the auspices of
the African American pastor
James Manning, who insists Columbia
University be held culpable
for forging credentials the uppity
would have no time to attain by the sweat
of his ancestral slave’s brow the prowess
to succeed his master’s progeny to
the presidency. We have learned so well
the Kenyan-Hawaiian conspiracy . . .
How disappointed we were meant to be
by now, and are and shall ever be . . . O
relinquish this nation to fascista,
lay the blame for what they do entirely
on that imposter Obama’s shoulders.
Yea, herald yet another document
to add to an appendix following
and including Cotton Mather’s WONDERS
OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD. We may read
this tome rather than another to learn
the evolution of our masters’ speech
as we understand why the Obaman
babies must be aborted in the womb,
how else evolve our promised master race?”

I have cut the pages, read the pure words
and refused to acknowledge the foul word
"nigger" that always follows "uppity" . . .
The tears of Jesse Jackson on the night
in Chicago he saw King’s dream come true,
elation blending memory with pain’s
bloodstains never expunged from Southern dirt,
and up North, where James Baldwin said they knife
you face to face rather than in the back,
comes news pols are restoring the poll tax
of not so many decades before now,
when a ninety-six-year-old black woman
is refused the right to vote, she has no
document to prove to the state she is
who she is, who voted seventy years
without fail, and says “I don’t have many
years left, and sure did not expect to be
robbed of my franchise . . .” I am a white boy
remembering Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner
buried under that Mississippi dam
once their bodies were riddled with bullets,
castrated, cursed and baptized with the dregs
oozing out of shattered whiskey bottles
before the shovels covered what can’t be
resurrected, only in memory
dug up with the story that can save us,
but not today, maybe never, who knows . . .
This pall covering so many coffins
is born of hate so foul its stink remains.

(11 October 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander