The Melanin Painted Cross

They call it “the land of the free.”

I call it my battlefield.

They call it “the home of the brave.”

I call it “the home of the chained.”

Everyday I walk atop the heads of my ancestors,

Watching as their hands reach up;

Orchestrating a pathway to better days.

I carry the load they left behind,

I carry it on the top of my head like a water pail,

While I march on with the rest of the weight distributed to my shoulders.

Eye black covers my face,

Replicating the whip-like scars that splattered across their backs.

Fanning out like the very hands that reach up from the soil each time I rise.

Covered in dirt, blood, and the weighted tears of every colored person or queer,

The hands remind us of the muffled voices of the unjustly shackled.

From the jailhouse to the mind.

We are handcuffed and forced to comply.

To remain silent unless spoken to.

To do as we are told.

We are forced to hide our colors and cover them with political orange jumpsuits.

They dare us to wave our flags, sing our songs, tell our stories.

Only to take our lives when we do.

They sprinkle the streets with our blood and crucify us for bearing crosses that we were born with.

Crosses that we didn’t ask for, into a world that didn’t ask for us.

Yet, ironically, we live in the same world that forced us to come here.

A world that only saw us as property.

Now the wider our eyes get and the browner the world gets, the redder the whites get.

It’s as if they cover their faces with our blood while we cover ours with their pride.

It seems we are all fighting a war.

A war of right and wrong.

Free and imprisoned.

Waving different flags, we fight.

One Star Spangled Banner and one Melanin Painted Cross.

We fight as our ancestors watch the vicious cycle that we were born into.

The cycle of littering this world with the same blood we all bleed that comes from the rainbow of people that sacrificed their lives to build this “land of the free.”

Only to be crucified for living like “the home of the brave.”