Loud and Long Through the
Valley
By Andrea Barnwell
Loud and long in the darkness
Of early mourning I hear
Hoots, horns from train whistles announcing
a warning:
Passing Through the valley!
Passing through with heavy containers
From the crop fields to county and city
jails
They carry the hearts and souls of our boys
Through the Switch Yard, changing
Dreams, erasing education, moving young
Brown bodies along busy tracks
In the early A.M. mourning of
“Oh-Dark-Thirty”
Carrying the produce of mothers, the hope of
fathers
The family growers planting love lose out
to
The labor of the hand-pickers,
The juvenile justice takes criminal pleasure
in
Sweet fruit and harvests lives like
vegetables grown too thick,
Too healthy, too threatening, so full of
life,
The meat slayers and haymakers bind and
bundle,
Raise up, slaughter, drain, ice pack and
head-crack kids
Like food headed for the institutions
prepped and prepared
For delivery they carry them away all across
our county,
Our Promise, our Fortune, our forgotten
children
Hauled in the “Gut Truck” reeling the stench
of half-alive
Bodies, beautifully dressed, millions of
maimed brothers
Fed to supply the prison machine demanding
more blood,
More raw fresh flesh for the handlers, more
time, more bookings
Loud and long I hear our sons cry and moan
through the valley
In the darkness of early mourning sounds of
trains roll
Over hot tracks make it feel like progress
is backward,
Payment is overdue from the meat packers
Nothing compensates for spirits killed,
failures to thrive
Fortunes and futures aborted for centuries.
This rare new taste for enslavement renders
us endangered
Would that a stick of dynamite could
dismantle the route,
Deter the journey; blow up the whole scheme,
Stomp ‘em in their tracks, just move them to
reason
Perhaps then we would build schools in the
Valley,
Perhaps then logic would lead the nation to
fill trains with true garbage,
Landfill the wasted bitter years with
equity, sweet songs long and loud
Sing forgiveness, pack up providers, and
replenish the earth
Sown with love seeds
for all humanity.
11/20/08 by Abena © Andrea
Barnwell |
