Have you tried the truth yet?
I know, it is disgusting--
All of those wet bodies
Not sardines, but all the more so
Entombed.
Sardines but human
Raped young bulls but human
Slaughterhouse but human home.
I
Do not
Know
What any grandchild is to make of all these ashes,
But to deny the ashes exist?
While he’s coughing up blood
Lungs filled of fluid and another man’s folly?
The banks like the back are broken,
Feeble
Arms grasping at the edges of their own extinction.
My God, how tired the dollar bill must be!
Weighed down by centuries of dead skin and bones;
I do not pity its inevitable demise.
Neither is an apology lethal
Is not humiliating
Is not exacting, even but
Rather a calling to arms, to alliance.
The grandsons would like to put the urn down now
But safely
But gently
But human.
Grief of such impenetrable power
Cannot run its river course
Without allowance from the trees to
Bend.
Postscript// my own ancestors were complicit in the gravest crimes in human history; that doesn’t make me a victim of slavery and that doesn’t make me my ancestors.
Isaiah 58:6
