A Requiem For Trayvon Martin

Jehovah Gmolah, my spirit is grieved… 

There are no colored boys who are allowed

To ease the crystal stair of American fancy. 

The wood-bare ladder that has been unceremoniously afforded to you

Is seemingly bereft of angels. 

Where is your portion of good? 

Do they not know – are you not a child of God, too? 

Woe has become me. 

I do not dare look upon

The empty cradle in your eyes.  

Your innocence has been snatched by those who slither 

With calculated stealth. 

In the nocturnal hour they swallow our young whole.

Who will inform the scattered remnant 

If little Jeremiah is snuffed out as our lids are drawn closed?

Why is my subconscious beset with genocidal nightmares?

Woe has become me.

A man child slain before his prophetic voice is able to reach a rich bass.

We are a forgetful people,

Amnesiacs with unknown magic in their skin.

The beast knows this.

So it devours you in the night my Abel as me and Adam sleep.

My ears bleed at the sound of a hissing hushabye– POP POP POP!

Woe has become me

Lull me no more America

Lull my black boy away from me no more.

Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall. My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.  They are new every morning. 

~Lamentations 3:19-23  

Insomnia Is My Baby's Daddy!

This is one of many zygotes conceived in the lust of  the dream to write a novel...one day (long sigh).  The concept I envisioned was a love story with a feel like the movie "Love & Basketball" only exchanging the basketball for church.  My main character/speaker is a woman with an agnostic belief system.  I like her a lot so far but I 'm not sure if I  will have the chance to hang out with her in the future...another one to be kept in gestation until I'm ready to push.

My infatuation started when I was eight.  I would sit in a maple wood, yellow cushioned pew gazing with long affection at my cousin as she sang with innocent jubilee in the New Clint Baptist Church choir.  They were a small bunch.  An open call banding of precious, tender eyed girls and bored, lazy lipped boys who had been coerced through biblically backed suggestion to render their reasonable service to the sunshine choir.  I adored watching all of their faces even the stone faces of the mute boys.  I envied their affiliation to something bigger than their individual selves.

I am thirty now with a hard won perspective on my previous relationships.  It is an outlook that would garner vehement disdain from most but I maintain my stance nonetheless because its mine.  My only loyalty lies in the spirit of what is true for me.  Agency - "for ye are gods, children of the Most High." I am no saint but what I do claim to be is a god in my own right - creator and proprietor over the course of my life.  This takes courage.  It is a singular practice in consistently ascending beyond the crucifixion of others expectations - a kind of violence that for most begets a kind of Stockholm effect of aligning with the captors of your true self.  It takes courage to escape.  But it is a fortitude that takes years to construct.  It is definitely a work – building brick by red brick.

I met him in college.  He was the affectionate jock in my English 101 class.  He moved from classmate to classmate with ease in the anxious minutes before the tolling bell of the professor’s voice initiated the clamor of ball point pens buzzing in between red margins and blue lines.  And when class ended he managed to delightfully reconcile every conversation he began in the eve minutes of class.  In this he exuded a methodical amiableness.  A personable character motivated by the foreknowledge of how small talk now makes for big connections post grad.  But what most people saw was a jock which equals simpleton in the stereotype ravaged minds of most.  But what I suspected was that he was a clandestine savant.  A trickster posing as the unassuming scarecrow who all along had a brain.  But this notion rested on the fence of maybe, possibly.  I too held loose thoughts of how he would flunk out when his body or eligibility no longer served the agenda of the club.  He shamed the doubting Thomas in me with our first conversation…

"And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry."

~Habakkuk 2: 2-3

Lioness of Judah

In Memory of Mary Magdalene, Apostola Apostolorum
For all women and all who walk in the calling of their spiritual office without apology, rebuking the false prophecy of how the move of God is quenched by estrogen…

Overall, you are sweet. You give freely of your time and resources. But I have seen your jagged edges… they are quick to scathe if one does not take notice to translate the space between each word you utter. In between, I heard the roll of your low boil anger when you said, “You like using big words, huh?” Nothing primes you for irritation like the chalk board scratch of a “side piece," a rib speaking beyond your worldly and spiritual awareness. A penis ALWAYS qualifies you as the infantry; a vagina ONLY qualifies me as support personnel. Therefore, I’ve refused your invitations to labor after what you would call “the good fight” because busy work bores me. Only a drone would be satisfied with black and white photocopies for education. The truth is…you despise my rebellion. I don’t “get happy” to the status quo. Doing a jig for a co-opted Jesus is spiritually cumbersome to someone who experiences God in the silence that creates the up and down beats.  I am an annoyance to your brand of religion because I see it as just that, a brand. Riddle me this…who will give rise, quicken the leaven in The House of Bread if the Baker resigns? Do you have enough crumbs to satiate the hunger of this female pup or shall I rename myself Naomi and take a sabbatical from the land of my people? My “miss-assignment” has purpose…as an ill fitting shoe, the walk is painful but every heel to toe motion gets me there. Even your disdain works toward the betterment of the whole. ”All things work for good,” no doubt. Humph, maybe you should consider this…the resurrected Christ revealed himself to Mary FIRST; not Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John! Awe, is that an Eve diatribe I hear coming in the midst. Spare me! I assure you that your sex has plenteous representation of tragically flawed biblical characters. Shall I name a few? Nah, let’s not go tit for tat here. I have no true alt with you. The whole would benefit from our respective fields of experience, gleaning from the good in me and gleaning from the good in you to create a more perfect union under OUR God, under OUR faith. So no, I will not enable your bravado and lower my voice to a modest purr. All hail Shekinah, may she glory! I AM WOMAN… 

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."   ~Galatians 3:28 

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