How do you stand the smell of burning flesh
Interrupted dreams, interrupted success
Taken away while a Ghostly crowd shouts horray!
How do you stand as on lookers
Your chldren upon your shoulders
Ghostly spectators
Just to take a peek
Of a black face that hangs from a tree
How do you place a rope around his neck, then tie the knot
A black face who's only crime is being born someone you are not
Pictures develope in your children's mind as they watch
Blue and white collar trash given front seats free to take shots
So proud you even gave the moment a title
Coon burning- A bar-b-que- a repeated cycle
How do you stand the smell of burning flesh
A black face burned to mesh
Rope burns around his neck
How do you lynch a mother and her child
For her sun-kissed skin she is accused of being something wild
Black bodies hang and burn like wild fires
Black bodies beaten, torn, while the crowd never grew tiered
Can you imagine what it is like to hang from a tree
Feel fire beneath your feet
Hear the birds vacate their homes as they loudly tweet
Not only has nature been disrupted
But future relationships between Blacks and Whites have been corrupted
How do you heal the damage of my Fathers, my Mothers
My Sisters, my Brothers, my Forefathers, and my Foremothers
Nightmares haunt me seeing them hanging from a tree
Now concern with the destruction of nature
not the life you took to the Forest and hung from nature's trees
You now plant seeds to grow new trees
While Blacks dig up dirt in remembrance
Of a time when things were very different
Or are they
So the next time you discover a tree in the Forest that is burnig
Just know this, that somewhere is a black man or black woman
who smelled the smoke long before the fire starting burning
Lyching a White man's legacy
A Black man's tragedy
In loving memory of:
Laura Nelson and her son LW lyched May 25,1911
Earnest Harrison, Sam Reed, Frank Howard,
the three of them lynched together September 11, 1911
John Lee, lynched, beaten, and burned August 13, 1911
Clyde Johnson, lyched August 3, 1935
19 year old Elias Clayton, 19 year old Elmer Jackson,
20 year old Issac McGhee the three of them lynched June 15, 1920
Rubin Stacy lynched while four little white girls
watched with their Daddy July 15, 1935
And the countless other African Amerians
whose dreams were ended by the force attendence to a Black Tie Affair
|
