Elegy
By Abdul Ali
—for Troy Davis
1.
There was a light rain on the night
of your execution. Wet little pricks
exploding on the skin.
The gears on my bike jammed
so I pedaled crazy-legged, pumping
three times harder, making time.
I glide past a charter bus emptying
in front of the Supreme Court, I double
over at the mostly white choir:
I am Troy Davis / We are Troy Davis.
2.
I am Troy Davis / We Are Troy Davis.
My mother calls hours later,
crying until her eyes swell into beets.
Why are our mothers always crying?
Why am I not crying?
It’s become so familiar.
In my boyhood . . .
Rodney King; Billy Clubs;
Loose Nooses; L.A. Riots;
Abner Louima and his attackers:
the police officers shoving a plunger up his rectum;
Amadou Diallo: 41 gun shot wounds;
Echoes of Emmitt Till: Black mothers
unable to recognize their creations.
Men strung on trees left for the crows to suck.
The way Billie Holiday’s voice wrinkles
from horror. The gallant South,
the snickering wind.
3.
The gallant South, the snickering wind.
You were lethally injected:
poison entered your veins, stopped your heart,
then your breathing.
I wake up in a cold sweat
hearing you tell the family it wasn’t you.
You, Black Socrates. Galileo,
Prisoner to this skin.
I imagine your transition
to the other side with the ancestors.
Afro Blue. I imagine this life different—
not opposed to life, black life.
Not hateful. I imagine
this poem—a proper elegy.
Can you hear that? America singing.
Its trees mock us.
Its wind curses us.
No praying.
God’s ears are filled
with cotton.
4.
God’s ears are filled with cotton.
Death is my pulse.
I pray daily that I will live to be old,
healthy, but sometimes
I despair. I think
about my mother almost
being thrown on a subway track
carrying me in her belly.
Hearing the metal train car
moving in. Feeling my heart beat.
Wanting to save this black boy
from an early death.
Just one, Lord, spare me one.
I want to teach my daughter
that black doesn’t equal death;
and to love her people, all of them,
even the white great-grandmother
who got sick from giving birth
to half-white, all black babies.
And yet, I get quiet each time
we walk by Union Station
that increasingly resembles Monticello.
The homeless: who missed Emancipation
those Negro hymns no longer move me.
Everything is a countdown to
Swing low sweet chariot coming for to carry me home
to be a black mass, riding this skin,
a bomb ticking, soon to expire.
5.
A bomb ticking, soon to expire.
What if we didn’t have to die?
What would it mean to live?
What would it mean to give milk
to our own babies?
What would it mean to swim
to the bottom of the ocean,
recovering our bones?
What would it mean to visit
the African burial that is Wall Street?
What does it mean to tell your daughter
We were the first blue chip stock?
That we do not own our children, their lives.
That any motherfucker can point and say
kill that nigger. And it happens. Like that.
Like that. What does it mean to be free
when we’ve been property longer
than we’ve been free in this great nation?
What does it mean to say Troy Davis,
my dear brother, I’m Sorry.
A part of me died tonight.
I prayed for the mother ship to come
take me somewhere else.
Do aliens kill each other?
Dear black Socrates,
Galileo:
the planets are spinning.
Copyright Credit: Abdul Ali, "Elegy" from Trouble Sleeping. Copyright © 2015 by Abdul Ali. Reprinted by permission of New Issues Press.
Source: Trouble Sleeping (New Issues Press, 2015)