Four days bleed away
into a stream of
angered hot rancid blood.

while four girls forgotten stay
in the gleam of
where an eye wanting to see could, but

when a tower falls from the arms
of the sky
in a single day

only after
a people have been
suffocated and buried
in clay
over ten decades,

we choose to forget
this much longer pain,

but then
would cobras ever see
injustice in the food chain when
its own prey
a mouse is constantly stuck below
with nothing to gain, but

when a single fellow snake
is killed by man
as a trophy for its skin
the old mentality and ideology
no longer stays.

When a slave runs away
is freed
or displaced
the mind is still enslaved,
their heart is still engraved.

When ex-slaves have children,
this pain doesn’t abruptly wane,
but it becomes part of
the way we get
and stay
broken.
It is not simply an issue of “who we are.”

When slave owners
were told to let go
but held on tight
to what Linnaeus said was all right
and true to the science
of anthropology
though he spoke a simple lie,
they clutched their purses near
their contaminated souls
and refused to teach their children
that all humans were worthy of life
and future goals.

When a system that has long permitted slavery
hides and never apologized,
and simultaneously permitted a genocide
of the Pre-American societies and tribes
but still denies
the wrongs by calling it
a blessing in disguise,
to allow for a free republic
in which we say we can speak our minds
although we are then whispered and hissed at
from the back of our ears “Confine! Confine!”
after being minimized
and encouraged to remain quiet
with how they choose to shape us all,
the ghosts of the past always returns
and boasts a greater presence
when we haven’t yet tried to see and learn
of what may lead to a future fall
of an unrighteous dominance.

When you place the minimized
with other infected minds
without any intervention
to fix what flaws or misaligns
in their conventions,
we allow little slip ups
that happen way too often
to be normalized
and put aside
from our daily struggles,
which go uncried
by this society as a whole.

When you say it is only up to me
Martin Luther King,
or Mahatma Gandhi
to make a change,
you forget that we live in a jungle of relationships:
symbiotic, mutual and parasitic,

and we all
are a part of this world
where nothing goes untouched
by others,
so we must all commit
to fighting this brokenness
in a society that okays
walking up corpses
for stairs to a better place.

When you refuse to see the problem
and don’t want to listen,

you ignore and accept the
existence of this manufactured food chain
as a cobra would never need to see,
that they always will be
guaranteed food to eat.

When you forget on this day,
there was a killing of four,
and you say it can’t compare
to the killing of more,

you don’t see that this was one instance
among many others that went hushed
along the way,
for many were told to forget of those days
because “lingering does nothing to change”
they say
but forgetting never kept anyone
from stepping on already cracked spines
to reach their highs in time
with little dissent.

So the day goes by
forgotten once again
as we take no moment of silence,
no quiet,
no peace,
for those little girls
on 16th street
whose names we shall repeat
and remember today:
Addie Mae Collins
Cynthia Wesley
Carole Robertson
and
Carol Denise McNair,
our hearts are with you
and we still care.