1619

They say it started way back in 1619/

When ebony colored men left their continent/

To go, see, feel, the land of the civilized/

Pale colored men who regarded themselves as fully Christianized/

The blacks were treated well and their black skins idolized/

But it took less than 20 years for their true colors to materialize/

They said, if these niggers worked for us, wouldn’t our profits increase in size/

After all even the Bible did realize and recognize/

That rich men had to have servants to add to their merchandise/

Thus began the rounding up of Africans from and wide/

Fellow blacks working for the white oppressors for a minimal prize/

And so the greatest atrocity in human history was in gear high/

Yet the African seed is one that can not be mollified/

The proud African race always held its head up high- dignified/

It spawned great men here in the motherland and in the Diaspora despite being victimized/

Waiyaki wa Hinga, Koitalel arap Samoei, Mekatilili wa Medza fought for the rights of the black man and for which they died/

Booker T Washington and his kind and like/

Educated black and colored children to enhance their pride/

Marcus Garvey envisaged an African paradise/

Kwame Nkrumah dreamt of a single African enterprise/

Martin Luther King Jr used peace to fight a system that did not want all races equally quantified/

Elijah Muhammad had his nation of blacks who were Islamized/

And Nelson Mandela spent years in prison to see his people free and their land unoccupied/

Yet again we have sold our souls and pearls have been cast to the swine/

I am watching CNN and from the south of Spain they are reporting live/

Scores of black bodies have been washed ashore by the sea tide/

And they are bloating right there under the sun by the seaside/

My heart misses a beat and for a moment my feelings die/

I gasp and look up to the skies/

And loudly ask myself, are we back to 1619?

My City

The feeling is great, with the finger around the trigger/

As the chamber empties you really think you’ve grown bigger/

The hapless figure writhes in pain as life from him slithers/

Forever to be missed by loved ones to whom only memories linger/

On you move looking for the next target terrorizing the hood/

When she appears from her late night job and stops at the site of the face in a hood/

Which without a second thought and with total disregard for bad and good/

Proceeds to violently abuse the very institution of motherhood/

Is this what civilization bequeathed to my city/

Cold blooded animals wielding guns and machetes/

Homeless urchins trying to make a buck/

The lost generation who never had the luck/

To know their parents and now abandoned and forgotten/

They have to survive, through means legal and illegal, to free themselves from the net that caught ‘em/

They are not our problem, we think as we pass around the ball/

Of the pitiful blame game and drop it as quickly as we get them like hot coal/

We frown at their lack of education, while it was our collective failure that they didn’t get one/

Others may have got it, but employment was just but a painful distant mirage/

The role models we could look up in the society are as corrupt as they come/

Their fuel guzzlers juxtaposed with the garbage heaps where the homeless set up camp/

They make laws that virtually criminalize every unemployed youth/

Regardless they never set up frameworks to cater for them after school/

The disillusioned plunge head on into crime/

The ill-advised quickest way to make a dime/

Their human feelings neutered as they get mired in grime/

Friends, neighbours, brothers turn into human savages/

And become uninvited shareholders in your hard earned monthly wages/

Then finally the police bullet with them catches up/

Felled with their positive energies completely untapped/

And we now celebrate the definite peaceful nights and sleep/

For the great gangster has been dispatched into eternal sleep/

We forget he was just but a stage in the vicious cycle/

For a more lethal dragon springs up and spreads its tentacles/

And the problem we thought we eliminated never seems to come to an end/

Foe how long are we going to kill our young people/

When we could have molded them when still young and supple/

And cared more about their future and not only when campaigning for political office/

But for posterity and responsibility to suffice/

Is investing in the youth so much to ask/

Is affordable education too difficult a task/

And so is with making employment opportunities not so scarce/

For sure crime doesn’t pay/

But someone has to lead the way/

The proverbial Moses to part the waters of the Red Sea/

And open the eyes of the youth and make then see/

I don’t have the faintest clue as to who that person is/

But a look into your mirror migt shed some light into this/

Ends…