Yesterday, a good man nearly lost his home
& could hardly raise a hand to shield himself from the hands
that condemned long before he could speak his truth.
For here, to be innocent while Black is first to accept guilt!
He began his day with love: a warm hug,
a father’s tender goodbye to a loving daughter—
“Have a good day at school.”
Alas! A toddler’s innocent tongue, unspooling in glee,
became the anvil where her father’s shackles were forged.
For the patchwork quilt of her tattled testimony
met hastened verdicts from ears that heard
in black shades, darker than her father’s guilty skin.
His carefree whistling under the hot shower
soon became pleas of innocence falling on deaf ears,
besmirched by the tale of that innocent tongue
& the unconscious prejudice that says a Black man
who finds himself in the white man’s world
must first be guilty before he can be innocent,
& innocence must be bestowed through benevolence—
not the weight of truth balanced on the scale of evidence.
& so, a good man ends his day behind cold bars:
denied the daughter,
denied the wife,
denied the open sky,
& the comfort of a borrowed blanket on a cold winter night.
Woe to us who fled home carrying dreams of freedom…
For fragile is the assurance of safety far from home.
We walk with eyes closed in ignorant bliss on fragile ground,
where one moment of freedom slips into bondage
while the heavy wheels of Justice, blindfolded, grind slowly
to prove a man guilty by the very evidence of his innocence,
even when the tracks point nowhere near guilt—
just because he left his home to find bread in another man’s land.
Alas, a good man is trapped between a rock & a hard place:
if he is innocent, then those who love him are guilty;
if he is guilty, all he loves is torn away.
He woke up with everything & ended the night losing it all
because this machine of guilt must run its course.
Now, a father must fold his love & put it away,
lest the expression of it become the evidence of his guilt
in this land where his kind are born guilty,
& innocence is bestowed in subjective benevolence.
