August 28

America is the stuff of nightmares right now.

Political powers excrete propaganda, normalizing violence and lies.

Desensitization to State-sanctioned, extra-judicial killings, round-ups, gassing

The ceremony of innocence is drowned

Deputized, radicalized, lionized white children with AR-15s

Burning burning burning tongues of flame speak

The language of the unheard

Breonna Taylor lies still

Still without justice

Masks are too heavy a yoke

180,000 dead and counting

The center cannot hold.

August 28

Was always a day that made us look

Soberly, directly into the nightmares

The African bodies

Tortured across the Atlantic and miraculously survived

Only to be doomed in Jamestown

By blood and for generations

to enslavement in 1619

The mangled body of Emmett Till in 1955

Tortured and murdered by white lies and good ole boys protecting their property

The March on Washington 8 years later

Because the needle had not moved

America stuck at the same chorus:

white supremacy

Surely some revelation is at hand

Look

It’s August 28

In the spirit of Mahalia Jackson I encourage you:

Remember the dream

Tell it any way you can

Sing the prophet-poems of Moses and Miriam

Sing exodus sing freedom

God is our strength song and salvation

Pray your groans and let the Spirit translate

Know that the Spirit is grieved and brooding over the broken

Remember what Jesus said the Spirit of the Lord compelled within him:

A dream of GOOD news for the poor

of freedom for the prisoners

of blindness healed

A dream of the oppressed, free.

Remember the dream-killers that nailed Him

Could not hold Him in death

We sing a dream that can’t help but live

Breathes resurrection and life

That will hurl these nightmares into the sea

Run

Tell

That

*I have borrowed portions of William Butler Yeats’ “Second Coming” to write this piece