I Will Breathe

Caught the news today to see another tragedy,

Another family’s grief at the hand of the police,

Another community’s fury because he was an unarmed teen,

Seems like a running theme if you ask me.

 

Black men are systematically targeted,

Automatically profiled as hardened thugs,

Startled by the lack of humanity seen in us.

Started to cry in anger, fallen tears for our fallen peers

whose deaths have made them famous.

Protesting injustice to a system who perceives our cries for help

as people making a fuss, and they wonder why towns burn up.

 

Enslaved initially, beaten, raped and maimed,

until our history is erased from our brains.

Placed into a state of inferiority, perpetually rendering us captive,

Active are the thoughts of our oppressors who transformed us into bastards,

Transformed the plantations into prisons,

Further diminishing the value of black men

until laughter follows the thought of them,

 

Until the world’s convinced that Egypt’s not in them,

they’ll methodically strip the power of knowledge

which is the key to our strength.

The war on drugs has morphed into the war on us. . . . . .

Tired of imprisoning us so the answer is killing us,

filling us with clips of shells while flipping the script on us.

Saying that our violent trends justify the lack of life that’s in them,

but upon first sight, their minds are made up about how this will end.

 

But they won’t win!

I will breathe for the ones before me, whose lost breath pave the way for me.

I will breathe, patiently waiting for our essence to return safely.

My breathing is breeding life that no man can take, no slave master can rape,

no KKK can hate, no judge can incarcerate, and no court can segregate,

 

Because the origin of my breath is love.

Marshall Jones is a 40 year old man on a lifelong journey of bearing fruit for the Kingdom of God. The author of "A Raven's Meal" (RoseDog Books), a poetry collection, he aspires to target the grey areas, and the people who are terribly misunderstood by society. Believing that everyone deserves a voice, he not only shares his testimony, but he also tries to use his gifting to share other people's experiences as well. He writes from the prison system that has housed his body for 18 years, but also from the place that has been the catalyst to his freedom. Click on the YouTube Link below for his Book. or go to https://www.redthreadpoets.com/published-works/