THE SAME DEATH OVER AND OVER
OR
LULLABIES ARE FOR CHILDREN

“It's the small deaths in the supermarket” she said

trying to open my head

with her meat white cleaver

trying to tell me how

her pain met mine

halfway

between the smoking ruins in a black neighborhood of Los Angeles

and the bloody morning streets of child-killing New York.

Her poem reached like an arc across country and

“I'm trying to hear you” I said

roaring with my pain in a predawn city

where it is open season on black children

where my worst lullaby goes on over and over.

“I'm not fighting you” I said

“but it's the small deaths in the gutter

that are unmaking us all

and the white cop who shot down 10-year-old Clifford Glover

did not fire because he saw a girl.