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Still Life with Black Death Lyrics by Joshua Bennett

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One,
When the steel blue ghost standing at the podium says
Vonderrit Myers was no angel
All I can hear is,
"The boy was a human boy,
The boy had a best friend, and 206 bones,
The boy had a name that God didn't give him,
When he died, he did not bleed starlight or gold,
He was not half bird,
The gun spoke, and no flaxen wings shot from each shoulder,
As if to carry him beyond the bullet's swift assignment,
No, the boy was not a pillar of white smoke,
Bright enough to break a non-believer,
Make a holy man fall prostrate, heaving, heavy with contrition."
But let me be clear,
They are simply running out of ways to shame our dead,
How else to say, that they are guilty and yet unburied?
How else to erase him? If they cannot feign omnipotence,
Lay claim to the sky. Colonize heaven.
Take aim at the boy, just one more time, while everyone watches.
Two,
So when I say, "I do not believe in hell,
but there are nonetheless men, dead and living, I wish hell upon",
Understand I am first a historian of suffering,
That James Baldwin sang 'The Fire Next Time' in 1963,
And we are living in the wake of his impossible love.
I too dream of such heat.
Pray for flame with the diligence of a saint,
Scarlet tongues of light, sharp enough to cut bone and soul just the same,
My parents praise a vengeful God,
Son of all three, what else could I inherit but a commitment to the scales,
That killer woke up today,
Probably ate scrambled eggs for breakfast,
Brushed his teeth three times or fewer,
Walked in soft slippers through the living room today,
Checked the mail, while a child decomposed underground,
Held still beneath the bloodless weight of the law,
I yearn for nothing, if not equilibrium,
A means to honor how my elders taught me to pray,
"Lord, if you be at all, be a blade."
Credits
Joshua Bennett

Joshua Bennett

About “Still Life with Black Death” by Joshua Bennett

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