March with me
Lace tight your shoes with solemnity
Pressing on and ploughing through resolutely
Echoing footsteps just a spitting distance
From 1619 to 2020
A stormy walk the plank endurance
hunkering down spirit sick
deep in depths of persistence
to the everydayness of lamenting
another blue plague Of Black Death resistance
To unshackle any chains of oppression,
any chip off that old block we must question
Freedom and equality
Held down handcuffed and suffocated
Knee-deep in the big muddy
300 years under legalized brutality
Depicted that black is the lack
of a true human hue
and brown is beaten back
black and blue as their due
While shades of might without color of character
autocratically rule
Strung up willfully by timeworn superiority
and with the whip hand forcing obedient futility
Lashed and labored without gratuity
Only payment due was pain
Backs broke under the weight
of merciless Nationalistic gain
that chained many for years
Squeezed much wealth and pleasure
from all the blood sweat and tears
Reaped,raped muscled and hustled
out of our inner treasure
A renewable harvest of black looted booty
Stolen and summoned day and night
to hard work at the lorded ravagers leisure
Those who came to be American unwillingly
Robbed of their families and identity
Built this pick-pocketing fraudulent
plundering nation whos covenant
Is profiteering and piracy not democracy
We were not worth 40 acres and a mule
But we were Americas best crop
Along with the predatory uprooting
land larceny of planted fields of white cotton,
our budded youth too was picked,
sold down river and marked for resale
The continued flow of our blood
was their gravy train
Our worth was given on the house
hammered out from the gold of our soul
Melted down to subjugate and control
bankrupting our bodies and minds
to steal our citizenry
Arraigning us guilty continually
Justice abused and confused
by the complexion of pretentious favorability
March with me
Back to the ballot box
Unshackle the locks
on the people’s legislative door
Remove the bluster, bile and bull
From all who muster for more
While backhanding democracy off the floor
Step up from systematic cut throat poverty
Strapped and beggered low
Down at the heels weary
and poll taxed into obscurity
Stay firm on your feet without retreat
Let’s get our rightful standing started
steadfast and true hearted
for mercy and humanity
In a government that has far to go
Let the race baiting and lies
bite the bullet and not embed them
In our fleeing backs and pleading eyes
Reparations only begin to amend when
equality opportunity and civil liberties grow
Nothing else will add up to all we are owed
March with me
Moving forward with progress afoot
Let’s advance our children’s reality
Where their ethnicity is not a liability
And diversity Is a untroubled continuity
Based on our unique individuality
That is motivated and generated by unity
And justice is a comfortable dependability
That upholds all our people equally free
History marches alongside us
Let our feet today have upstanding applications
And our time here to not build any more
monuments of conquest, bigotry and mistrust
That scar the land and hearts for generations
-MLH