“You can’t write poems about the trees when the woods are full of policemen.”
…………………………………………………………………………………… —Bertolt Brecht
Broken Ghazal for Walter Scott
A video looping like a dirge on repeat, my soul—a psalm of bullets in my back.
I see you running, then drop, heavy hunted like prey with eight shots in the back.
Again, in my Facebook feed another black man dead, another fist in my throat.
You: prostrate on the green grass, handcuffed with your hands tied to your back.
Praises for the video, to the witness & his recording thumb, praises to YouTube
for taking the blindfold off Lady Justice, dipping her scales down with old weight
of strange fruit, to American eyeballs blinking & chewing the 24-hour news cycle:
another black body, another white cop. But let us go back to the broken tail light,
let’s find a man behind on his child support, let’s become his children, let’s call him
Papa. Let us chant Papa don’t run! Stay, stay back! Stay here with us. But Tiana—
you have got to stop watching this video. Walter is gone & he is not your daddy,
another story will come to your feed, stay back. But whisper—stay, once more,
with the denied breath of his absent CPR, praise his mother strumming Santana
with tiny hallelujahs up & down the harp of his back. Praise his mother hugging
the man who made her son a viral hit, a rerun to watch him die ad infintum, again
we go back, click replay at any moment. A video looping like a dirge on repeat—
by Tianna Clark
from I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018