July 4th, 2020
Black as the Night
Through the thick of the afternoon smoke
I choke
The air; heavy with dark charcoal, simmering
Premature fireworks, rising
As the sun doth set
Joyfulness floats on up through the thick of our gathering
Whilst oppression sits ever so quietly
Upon the dark of our chests
Resting
Coughing
Through the smog
I hear whispers rise from the fires
Up through the chatter
“I can’t breathe”
&
“Black Lives Matter”
So, I write a letter
In my head
To my, Dear Wayward Caucasian Counterparts,
hey, even some of my friends,
It read:
Just because you once took what you thought to be yours
Just because, once upon a time, you raped our mothers and sisters, our daughters
Just because you have always been justified in all that you do
That does not make it true
And it certainly does not make
The White Man my founding father
No, my daddy was a hard man
Black as the Night
A whips and chains kind of slave
to all he ever knew
A product of his culture
Through and through
He
Is
Not
You
There are armies of brown babies
That are now fully grown
Born from the perils of our predicament
We try call this country home
Archaic traditions
We are an entire rainbow tribe of mixed-up mutts
Hell-bent of the destruction of segregation
Envisioning a world where in which
All our colors may, one day, gently touch
For, we have been birthed from the merging of cultures
Ethnicity and skins
Languages and Accents
Of mashed up worldly-whims
So, how I plead, can I ever be separate from you
And you, from me?
When you, who just like me, makes up a part of Everything
My tribe is a modern-day balancing act of light and of dark
Of dusk and of dawn
Those who have died without reason
Amongst those who are simply born
into a world of blind celebration
that our nation,
Just like the black smudge of my clothing,
So proudly adorns
Yet instead of reds, whites and blues
We dared dress ourselves
Independently from Independence
In the deepest of the hues
And we choose, instead
To adorn ourselves
In black t-shirts, black trousers, black skirts and black shoes
For unlike our clothing, some things you cannot just take off
And just like the skin that I am in
Some things will not ever wash off
This is how we each are made
In perfection and love
But because of it
We have been cast in the shadows
that we have ultimately become
And this day of independence
It only ever offered liberty and justice for some
You need not a lesson in history
To know that the White Man was certainly made free
However,
My neighbors
My brothers
And my sisters
And a half, if-not the whole of me
Were still very much enslaved
Until the emancipation of Juneteenth
So, backless black garments
Brushed quietly against black skin
Black hearts, weathered
Against a dark and segregated sin
Black sky
Black eyes
A black man, whilst laying down
Involuntarily stood tall enough
to face the repercussions of our times
Standing, for all that it is worth,
Ten falsified stories high
And when he fell… well,
We all felt that thunder echo out across the entire world
The air was thick with terror
Tonight
Fireworks populate the New Orleans evening sky
Like soft fireflies
Lighting up
The eternal mystery of the Bayou
Scattered blimps of brightness
Illuminating like a shard of truth
Against an eternal misuse of power
And only is it here, against the ebony of the night
That the light may even begin to shine
They say that black is but the absence of color
But, sitting just outside the French Quarter that fourth
I pondered over it being more like that of a mirror
In which to see a variety of color more clearly from
For without my black brothers and sisters
Of which you compare yourself to
Who would you even be?
So… my dear crème de la crème
You
Are
Welcome
For, in our differences
In our contrasting darkness’
We have given you something that is akin to self-realization
Something you did not perhaps understand
And even though you have lain with the blackest of our berries
For the sweetest of their juices
You have mostly only feared us
Enslaved and persecuted
But I continue to pray for you
Tonight
As the evening stretches on,
like a black cat at the break of dawn,
into my own personal history
The smoke and the mischief thicken
Simultaneously
We drive out to the ends of the earth
A covert hideaway in the dumps of New Orleans
And from a pale pile of rubbish
We rise on up
Consumed with an overdue sense of equality
And in our collective actions,
Ten or so bodies deep
Cast in the secrecy of shadows
Black against back
Do we compete
against the crashing of fireworks exploding
The popping of off reverie
‘Were those fireworks or were they gunshots?’
It’s all too dark to see
And in the deep of the night
I feel what it is to hold the power of another’s life
Within the brown
Of my unskilled hands
A sturdy stance
And just like you
I was blinded in my environment
Bang
Motha’
Fuckin’
Bang
We screamed out internally
Against the wale of injustice’s war cries
Against the soft sob of the fractured city
That Black Lives Matter
That my tribes lives fucking matter
And I contribute
To the chaos around me
The moon: bright and as full as the sun, seeping with stories of loss and of love
Hangs over our heads in silence
Promising never to tell
Watching our dark explorations of the dump
Paying witness to our play
Taking head of our violence
The lights spark and flash around us
As we wordlessly clamber
Towards our own sense of personal power
A white moon
watches over our every move
Contrasted against
An ebony sky
That is
Black
Black
Black
As the night
But the moon
Makes not a sound
For where would the moon be without the dark of the night?
I ask,
To cast its light upon?
What backdrop could truly hold its grandeur
true to its own reflective form?
Light and dark they go together
The moon runs not to tell the Sun of what it has seen
Blubbering of what has been done
For the night is a time of deep mystery
It is a time of stories
And a time of secrets
Of hollow heart-wrenching loss
and of tender
enraptured
love
Instead, the moon just humbly hung there
In the wild of the wonderous night
And continued to shine by the light of solidarity
So that our colors may, one day,
ever
so
gently
touch.
Written by
April Lee Fields
Media by
Elliot Twiggman
&
April Lee Fields
Opmerkingen