Three white Ole Miss students use guns to vandalize a memorial to lynching victim Emmett Till
USA Today, July 2019
They pose their bodies as if they’ve just bagged
their first 10-point buck. One holds a shotgun,
another squats below the shot-up sign,
a third stands with an AR-15.
Three faces smiling, hoisting guns
in front of a bullet-ridden marker:
This is the site where Till’s body
was removed from the river.
It is hunters’ hours.
The sign’s jagged holes could slice
a finger. Those students are someone’s sons
or brothers, not much older than
the young Black boy, his body beaten,
tethered to a 75-pound cotton-gin fan
and thrown into the Tallahatchie.
This is an old story, a Southern Gothic.
To deny this boy’s life and then
deny the marker that says he lived
breaks me every time. The camera captures
the night’s dark cover, the tall grasses,
the momentary flash
illuminating their shit-eating grins
and the gun barrels’ glint—lifetimes
of getting away with it.
Source: Poetry (May 2021)