Grasslands

 Grasslands

Ignorance in the markers of my father’s father

Never growing up near a human being of color

Of knowing a man to man in hand

His family is like a stitching point marker in the sand

To say here is a day we have never conversed

And here after we have begun to see the other’s universe

I give you these words like a ticket to ride

The escalator up and down into the grasslands of this pride

To roam this savannah of ignorant predators and hunters

Of bounty for walls barren of structures

Made up over the most human of constructs

The twinge of melanin and the country that obstructs

The view to see the language like a conundrum cube

Twisting to solve all these lyrics babbling in the brooks

Of all these rivers we fear to change the levees of man

Straddling these waters with the eclipsed hands

Shading and fading into restraining to speak

Out of this unknown like a carriage ride with an engine of pride

Pumping fossil fuels of dinosaur dreams praying for extinction

Before buffering the battles of these leaves

Falling in autumns of Septembers to come and

Anna begins to change her mind and the whole system is dumb

Found on a street corner watching conversations on face books

Dropping hints that the barriers between these dreams

Are shaping and sending and melting and mending the

Grandfather’s gerrymandered lines political capital rain drops

Soaking in soils of old Southern oils basting these turkeys

In a Thanksgiving of Indian summers for American falls

Maybe now, maybe never, but I give you the Rain King’s call

Know these neighbors and the savannah’s grass won’t need to be grown so tall