A Black Rose In Bloom!

Too dark, but yet, always seen
at each and every crime scene.
Whether you stand for peace or not,
whatever you do, it is all for naught.

You can be Dr. King with a dream
or Malcolm X with a Black power scream.
But either way, you’ll end up dead;
no life in you; just a tombstone at your head.

You can be a doctor walking home from work
and be shot because in that neighborhood, you should not lurk.
You go to school because you want an education,
but they peg you instead for incarceration.

They gave you a month to celebrate achievements
for all the assassinations, funerals and bereavements.
You are sent to their doctors to receive a cure
and told you’ve got bad blood; it just ain’t pure.

They say, “Vaccinate your children against this disease,”
while they fill you with lead paint; those who are your enemies.
Never look to the ones with no melanin in their skin
and expect to come out on top, or to win.

Their desire is not that you should ever thrive
but for all they do to you, you still manage to survive.
So, fear not that Trump will be the harbinger of your doom
for he too is powerless to stop a Black rose in bloom!

Written by,
Shelby I. Courtland
©2017 Shelby I. Courtland

I wrote this because as we all know, we just finished ‘celebrating’ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day and for all that has been going down, I don’t even know why. For surely he could never have perceived in his wildest ‘dreams’ that we would be where we are now, but then again, he most likely would not be surprised since it is widely known that he was about to change his stance from one of peaceful to aggressive because peaceful just wasn’t getting it done. And us Black folk had better go about things all peaceful like, if we are to go about at all. Otherwise, it’s a coffin for us.

And yet, they set aside a day in remembrance of a man they killed because he finally figured out what most of us know and that is that the white man is not going to give up his ‘white privilege’ that he has decreed unto himself; not without a fight. Malcolm X knew this and that is why he was called a ‘radical’ and assassinated. We need more like him but all we have is the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who are nothing more than sell-out dogs begging for the white man’s table scraps. They do not represent us. They are only out for themselves.

So, as we approach Black History Month that the whites have so graciously given to us to celebrate all their achievements of shooting, lynching or sickening us and our loved ones, we must remember to thank them for their generosity in giving us the month of February to be used as one short month of bereavement over the fact of mass incarceration, assassinations, lynching, gentrification, income inequality, low educational attainment, a school-to-prison pipeline,  mass homelessness, indifferent health care, eugenics experimentation and we must also thank them for allowing us to continue to play subservient roles that entail cleaning, cooking and other domestic type duties that we crawled into boats to come over here alongside all the other ‘immigrants’ to do. With friends like these, we don’t need enemies and yet, despite all of this, the Black rose still blooms! May it forever bloom in spite of and despite ‘them’!