May 3, 2015 Current Affairs / General Interest, Original Poetry
They Will Not Die (Elegy #2 for Freddie Gray)
By Vijaya Sundaram
©May 2nd, 2015
Freddie Gray is dead,
Voice-box crushed,
Back broken in a
Nickel-ride homicide.
Was there hope for Freddie Gray,
Gray in a grey world?
Nebulous justice rules, a
Cloudy truth in the world of
The makers and breakers.
Hope is crushed, lowered
Into the ground,
Back in the box whence she came.
Yet, voices outside speak aloud
Angry and proud, people stand
And march, and … then throw rocks.
For, when words don’t work, what’s left?
When actions born of peace
Lead to laughing contempt,
Blank indifference, grudging handouts,
What’s left?
When blinded eyes, blinded mouths,
Blinded hearts, blinding fears
Rule the rulers, and crush
The ruled and the damned,
What else is left?
And a city burns,
Children cry out, eyes stretched wide
And injustice rides
Comfortably, now in blue,
Shielded by certainty
That they will not lose
This game, their game.
For they own the weapons
They own the power
They own it all,
But they will never
Own the truth.
And Justice will come
For they do not own her, either,
Just her simulacrum.
And they will receive just desserts
And face an eternity
Where unending despair
And hungry remorse will
Claw and gnaw at their vitals,
And they will not die.
And Freddie Gray
Will live, if we let him,
If we remember.
_________________________________________________________
Tags: Baltimore, Freddie Gray, Police, Race, Remember
May 3, 2015 Current Affairs / General Interest, Original Poetry
Speak – A Lamentation
By Vijaya Sundaram
©May 2nd , 2015
Spine broken,
Voice box crushed,
Yet another young man
Dies, beaten in the race
Of life.
Twenty-five years alive —
Now, older than time.
Life stretched before him
Before death came
Cruelly, in the back
Of a nickel-ride van.
He broke his own spine, they say.
They lie! How they lie!
Our hearts fail us, sense falters —
Brazen untruth spewed from mouths of
Killers, snuffers of the weak,
The disenfranchised,
Our police ride strong,
While a son is dead.
He broke his own spine, you say?
I laugh in disbelief.
But some buy their story
Listening with stretched ears
To lies pouring from all sides.
For lies sustain some,
And comfort them, while
They sit spellbound,
While flat-screens, plasmic,
Pour out flat people
Speaking flatly about
A three-dimensional world
Rendered two-dimensional —
A grotesque Guernica
Sans history, sans meaning,
To those who sit,
Gesturing with painted fingernails,
Dyed hair, painted-on smiles,
Or communing with
Neatly slicked-back hair and
Business suits, patent-leather shoes,
Sputtering about matters they know not of.
But this death looms over us, while
Yet more voices arise —
An ark on a wave of sorrow.
And who will ride this wave?
And who will bring the ark
To land again?
And who will bring back
The olive branch, the olive leaf
And who will sight land?
And who will stand tall
And who will speak
And whose backs
Will take the weight
Of all they need
To build again, anew?
And who will remember
And mourn all the
Freddie Grays
Of the world
Extinguished, voiceless,
Back broken?
And who will speak for them?
And who will listen?
And who will heal
A nation that kills its own?
Tell me when you know.
________________________________________