This morning, I woke up to a text message I received last night.
"I wonder if you are sitting and watching live feeds from ferguson too."
"I wonder if you are sitting and watching live feeds from ferguson too."
And last night, I wasn't. I saw the news. I read some Aimé Césaire poems. I went to sleep. I dreamt of translating poems. And woke up with those dreams
swirling in my head.
This morning, I found that message and
Ferguson came rushing in. And I listened to the radio reports. Read the online
news.
And then went back to a book of poems I've been reading. Shane McCrae's book of poetry, Blood.
And then went back to a book of poems I've been reading. Shane McCrae's book of poetry, Blood.
And something about spending time with his words
brought back the enormity of the situation. The fact that, as I read in a
friend's post online, it's not the riots that are the great risk or the greatest threat, it's the
possibility of more Darren Wilsons.
You stab a man you break his skull
you want that man to see you
That man won't know he's / Nothing
if he can't look you in the eye
Reading online of Wilson's testimony: this
demon he imagined had been unleashed upon him. The desperation and the mania Wilson imagined in the body, the face, the arms of Michael
Brown. The depth of white fear. The shocking, irrepressible white ability to
imagine and re-imagine the possibility of danger in a black body.
McCrae has a poem in the voice of a free black
soldier during the Civil War era. This voice says:
One day we stopped a train took Yankee / Money
I held my rifle on a Yankee
soldier he just looked at me so scared
Like he never knew / What a rifle was
until he saw one in my hands
It seems Wilson was afraid because—as officers always say in these murder cases—he thought he saw Brown reach for his waistband. Even the possibility of a gun in a black hand is overwhelming. The possibility makes for a reasonable fear in the eyes of that grand jury. The possibility is enough to make murder justifiable in the eyes of the law.
The videos I saw online have interviews with witnesses to the murder. They talk about the injustice represented by the amount of time Brown's body spent on the ground. How could they leave his body there so long. How could they not cover his body with something. There were children around, they say. One woman said the blood was red at first. Then, the blood stayed there so long on the pavement that it turned black.
And blood sprayed from the artery
A rose
like if the Lord had stopped
making in the middle of mak-
ing red
roses
and never made their boundaries
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As Autumn Knight says in this video: Hard times everywhere.
Autumn Knight: in-situ artist in –residence (006) 2014 from PeopleStaring on Vimeo.
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Black lives matter. And Black art matters. And helps.