A Sunday Poem: Black Women Lying on the Grass

BBlack women lying on grasslack lives matter.

Do they?

Black women lying on the grass .

White lives matter.

Of course they do. They always have. But it is

Black women lying on the grass.

All lives matter.

If they do then why is it that we see

Black women lying on the grass.

Dajerria Becton, 15, in a bathing suit

At a Texas pool party was one of the

Black women lying on the grass

With a white policeman kneeling on her.

Black lives matter.

Do they?

Have you seen a 15-year-old white woman in a bathing suit lying on the grass

With a police man kneeling on her?

Sandra Bland, 28, in a long dress was another

Black women lying on the grass

For not signaling a lane change

With a white policeman standing over her

Black lives matter.

Do they?

Have you seen a 28  year old white woman  in a long dress lying on the grass

With a white policeman standing over her. All we see are

Black women lying on the grass

11 Comments

  1. John King McDonald

    * SHAYS ( REBELLION ) … Damn, but I loved those Congregational Services I attended during my Pioneer Valley EXILE 🙂 : Community Singing I happily brought my Irish tenor to, Open discussion of Minister’s challenging theological questions, and a energetically uninhibited Church Organist who would play her accompaniments in her stockinged feet because in her person Muscular Christianity was a lifestyle, and no mere Creed. I really liked and felt welcomed by these cultural descendants of the rebellious Shay .

  2. John King McDonald

    * Hackle raising South Carolina lynching and silhouetted against night sky straight evil enacted sight of same was source of Barry Davis’s poetic fury that resulted in BITTER FRUIT ; he first published his poem in 1937 with that original title. Subsequent publications elaborated its pivotal line ” A strange and bitter fruit ” into the title most are now familiar with … A STRANGE AND BITTER FRUIT. Billie Holiday sang it. And it became, Rightfully, the dark dark National Anthem of our Country. And being Black Irish has very much to do with understanding why this is so !!! …………….. 🙂

  3. John King McDonald

    ADA CONNOLLY/ NORFOLK :

    Travelled through your Saturday synopsis of John McIntyre murder most foul a few minutes ago. It was latter part of a longer comment/response from you re: various fabulisms in … The Saga. All fun and free verse channeling of genuine feelings aside , your ” McIntyre Take ” is one I am in absolute accord with. Your intellectual honesty and ” Process ” as research deepens, synapses fire on the whole deal as ” connections” neurally map an evolving paradigm of some reasonable and rational semblance of truth, and old ideas and conclusions are, ” like water on the wearing rock ” ( Bruce Lee) effortlessly streamed away as you be ” like the water, not the wearing rock ” is … Impressive .

  4. John King McDonald

    Ms. Freeh :

    This is a FAMILY JOINT !!!!!!!! … There will be no more of this Public Pelvic Yoga Stretching from You and Elbows Wychulis. ASSES AND ELBOWS MS.

    ASSES AND ELBOWS 🙂 That’s ALL We want to see from you two on the Ice .

  5. John King McDonald

    Limpid prose MTC. It’s Title : LACK LIVES MATTER, a typo, but an interesting one. BITTER FRUIT is a poem delineating a horrid social reality. Certain things have clearly chsnged fot the better since. So, # DEMAGOGUERY EXPLOITS MATTERS FOR IDEO/POLITICO GAINS MATTERS MATTER. MATTERS ; JUST WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU CLAIMING IS THR MATTER? 🙂 … Know an absolutely beautiful chick Sarah Y. up in Western Mass. She is white, of maternal Irish and paternal Iranian descent ; now a 30 year old widow doing super job raising her two boys. Sarah is a rebel, though she has chilled ” considerable.” In early 2000’s she got maced and dragged to cruiser by her dredlocks kicking and caterwauling all the way. This was in the main uptown plaza of a green little pocket of Happy Valley SHEA’S REBELLION COUNTRY that I name not as it’s actually generally a pretty cool little burg. So …
    file under : # STOP THE ” VIOLINS ” 🙂

    • One good thing about the criminal justice field is that it is evidence based. They come up with a reasonable hypothesis based on data and draw conclusions based on evidence.

      You explain something to these professionals, you show them the evidence, and give them a procedure, they want to to do a good job, and they will follow it.

      These problems have been brought to light and it will be for the most part fixed I am sure of it. The battle against urban street crime is being won to a great extent. Boston used to average 13 homicides in July. There have been 15 homicides in Boston so far all year. There is no need for the police to take short cuts to with vulnerable populations. This is a serious but fixable problem.

      • My grandparents came from a Northern province in Spain
        called Galacia.
        Over the years I would become uneasy
        when I heard the expression “black irish”
        that is until I heard James Brown singing
        ” get up off of that thing….”

        in other news 2 stories

        1.

        Open Cases: Why One-Third Of Murders In America Go Unresolved …
        http://www.npr.org › News › US
        Mar 30, 2015 – His is one of at least 200,000 unsolved murder cases in the U.S. since …. and he says some investigators were getting as many as five or six …

        2.

        http://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2015/07/26/fbi-mined-secrets-mcgoverns-past/30689729/
        FBI mined secrets from George McGovern’s past

        FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in 1967 and U.S. Sen. George McGovern in
        1975.
        On April 16, 1975, two FBI inspectors met with Sen. George McGovern in
        Washington.
        A month earlier, McGovern had written a letter to FBI Director
        Clarence Kelley asking for a copy of any file that the FBI kept on
        him. In fact, unbeknownst to McGovern, the FBI had accumulated a large
        file on the senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, but FBI
        officials were reluctant to share the information. The two FBI
        inspectors met with McGovern to negotiate a compromise.
        McGovern, according to an FBI account of the meeting, was agreeable to
        a compromise. There was a chance, he told the inspectors, that he
        might be on the national ticket in the next presidential race in 1976.
        He related his own disastrous experience with his first
        vice-presidential candidate in 1972, and he wanted to be able to tell
        any potential running mate if the FBI possessed derogatory information
        about him.
        Specifically, he wanted to know if the FBI had information about a
        child he fathered as a young man.

        Part 1: See the George McGovern FBI files

        The two inspectors reported the conversation. A month later, on May
        14, they met again with McGovern. They were authorized to give
        McGovern an oral account of what was in his records. They shared with
        McGovern that in 1960, during a thorough background search after he’d
        been nominated to serve in John F. Kennedy’s administration, FBI
        investigators verified an allegation that McGovern had fathered a
        child.
        McGovern, according to the FBI’s account of the meeting, “made no
        comment nor asked any questions about the statement that the
        allegation concerning the illegitimate child had been verified during
        the special inquiry investigation.”
        The documents that relate those scenes are among the nearly 1,400
        pages in McGovern’s FBI files. The Argu

  6. Does a bear s**t in the woods?
    Of course it does, but it is not necessarily newsworthy.

    Does something happen only if and when the media finds it newsworthy and reports it?
    For some, yes.

  7. Matt, Thanks for doing your part to help move us forward toward a better future on this vitally important issue.

  8. “only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”
    ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

    in other news

    https://truthandshadows.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/springmann-cover.jpg?w=620

    “… While he served as a visa officer in the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for instance, he was obliged under threat of dismissal to issue visas to persons hired clandestinely by the CIA to become trained-in-the-USA terrorists. Most of these psychopathic thugs were clearly and legally unqualified to be issued visas. There is every reason to believe the “Visas for Terrorists” program remains fully operative today. It takes a lot of expendable terrorists to run a global terrorism op.

    Springmann places his experiences both within the context of the historical roots of the U.S. Empire and within its current ongoing global destabilization project.

    “This tale,” the author states near the beginning, “is a sordid sketch of backstabbing, disloyalty, double crosses, faithlessness, falsity, perfidy, sellouts, treachery, and betrayal.”

    And that only covers the bureaucratic aspect. Even more sobering is his sketch of human rights violations: torture, assassinations, massacres including bombings of markets, invasions and occupations of countries, destabilization of nations and regions.

    Then there’s the financial side: widespread criminality, resource theft, bribery, diversion of funds, illicit drug dealing and more.

    Not to mention the flouting of international laws. This dimension includes gross infringements on national sovereignty, the casual violation of treaties and ho-hum everyday general lawlessness, risking even the threat of nuclear annihilation.

    All this before taking into account the moral dimension, in which trashing the Ten Commandments is just an opening trifle…..”

    https://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2015/06/19/whistle-blower-reveals-secret-u-s-program-to-recruit-train-and-provide-visas-to-terrorists/

    • MS:

      Rilke – I knew little of the man but my son read much of his works. Your quote from Rilke’s letter to the young student at the military academy could only be written by a poet. I find you either have a deep understanding or a nice appreciation of poetry or lean to being a curmudgeon. Unfortunately, I find myself in the latter group either not having been educated to understand it or despite having had that education inherently unable to appreciate it because of my laziness or some other fault.

      I can only pass back to you advise from Mark Twain. “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”