you died gently,
without fighting
what was murdering you.
and maybe that’s
why your death moved
us so deeply. maybe
at the end there your life
seemed a wasted
thing, with three jail
terms behind you,
as you went to
the shop to buy
something with a
twenty-dollar
counterfeit bill.
the store owner
called the cops on
you, for twenty dollars.
i dread to think
how he must feel,
that his call in effect
led to your death.
we make too big a deal
about death.
it comes
and it’s over.
it goes into the air,
into the earth.
it rarely changes life.
but all through that
last hour, as the
police manhandled you,
twisted your arm
behind your back,
forced you to the
ground, and one of
them, the weirdest
of them, stuck his
knee on your wind-
pipe and took no
notice as you
whispered something
sixteen times, the
two other officers
simply stood there,
witnesses to the law
killing the law,
while concerned citizens
attempt intervention,
without power.
you didn’t see all
that. maybe all you saw
were the final moments
of your leap, when
on the school team,
you were going to touch
the sky and touch
the world; your leap
back then, how full
of promise, full
of the power to help
a team win. life
afterwards was a long
fall into the abyss
of america, where
to be black is to make
an early pact
with death, not your
own death, but the death
that’s waiting for you in
the blackness of
america.
maybe you saw all that
or remembered you at
a friend’s wedding
wearing a white suit, tall
like the bridegroom of
aphrodite, tall for
a big destiny, that
eluded you,
year after year,
in the purple
light of the republic.
and all those roads,
all those failed prom-
ises brought you
here, with your neck
beneath the knee
of a policeman,
the breath of life
fading from you
like the fragrance
from the autumn roses.
you called your breath
sixteen times, like
a sad lover, while two
white women filmed
the grim catastrophe
of injustice that bloomed
there in lincoln’s
graveyard, the whole
broken earth of
america.
you didn’t fight
you simply faded as
your breath drifted
away beneath
the knee of justice.
you hadn’t been charged
you hadn’t been tried
you hadn’t been found guilty.
you had not been sentenced
and yet you were
being crushed to
death, while
the whole
world watched.
maybe it’s because you
did not fight, did
not struggle, because you
knew that to resist was
to invite death
from the law. you
learned not to struggle, not
to curse, not to protest,
not to fight back, only
how to die like flotsam
on a receding tide.
it was a kind of love,
your dying. a kind of
gentleness. There’s
no end to the insult
we suffer. when
did it really begin?
but it was that
way you let your
breath go, let it
go sixteen times,
watching it, eyes
slowly dimming,
maybe it was
your doing nothing but
let the heart of
america reveal
itself that was
the greatest way
of speaking, the
greater way of
dying, that brings
down the whole dead
house of race, that
died long ago
in white power,
in black silence,
died but did not
know it, because
of all the guns,
the law, the whole
invisible, inviolate
matrix of sustenance.
but hatred dies
slowly, dies a long time
and maybe will never
die truly as long as
eyes see fear where
heart sees flowers.
what did i ever do
to be hated by you?
and so your death
passed into the
force of history,
because it awakened
the silences
the pain
the injustices that
have been stored up
for four hundred
colourless years.
you died into silence
but the big world
rose up in speech.
there’s no poetry
of change greater
than when the world
sees at last that
it can be free
free to breathe the light that
keeps the republic alive.