Matt Cooper
Guest Poet
Blindness of men often comes with
Clear sight and a clenched tongue.
Behind the veils of cold eyes a
Ten cent minstrel show goes on and
Unfurls the story of a full spectrum
Of peoples who built roads and canals,
Who built levies and earthen dikes,
Who at the same time were starved,
whipped, maimed, butchered spit on and
caged alongside their infant children.
Eyes open. Curtains lift. History is gone.
So is with the acceptance of man. Gone.
What does this lasting bigotry mean?
“Am I afraid? Am I timid? Need I
Be captured and branded with a foreign
Name to understand?”, the white man asks.
A man is prone to ethnic ignorance,
At least for a moment, until his feet
Are wet with understanding, his eyes
Are unglazed and the light shown down
From the indiscriminate sun is clear.
In revelation, his racism may abate.
All might be embraced for a time.
But now, there is no resolve for us.
Our new and again great America
Has become a tintype photograph,
Frozen in the annals of what would
Appear to be the post-war years
Or the Jim Crow period of
Dead boys swinging like pendulums in trees.
O, thy wives chained!
O, thy brilliant colors bound!
And now, instead of young brown men,
All hearts, minds, dreams and wills
Of the people are lynched.
Spirits are gassed in the chambers
Of greedy and ignoble willed politicians.
Together.
Exxon guffaws at our cancers.
OPEC cooks our seas to opaque black tar.
Facebook launders our thoughts.
Frito Lay monitors our blood sugar.
Monsanto engineers our fruits in petri dishes
While three men in four figure suits enslave us,
Our children and our childrens’ childrens’
Children!
Together.
Alone.
The white man remains dulled,
Refusing to wake from apathetic sleep.
With his feet soaked in rivers of
Antebellum blood, his hands quiver
As though civil wars are coming.
