Requiem for Renee

Yesterday I asked how much to let the news seep into my heart and used my privilege of being far away from the direct impact of ICE violence to make it seem okay. Shame on me. But today, Renee Nicole Good’s story found its way into my heart and this poem is my response. 

 

ON THE MURDER OF RENEE NICOLE GOOD

 

My silence is not complicity. 

It is neither uncaring nor unknowing. 

My silence comes from a heart which can find no words large enough 

to express the enormity of this next calamity. 

Add together grief and anguish and deep sorrow, 

outrage and horror and fury, and 

you still don’t get one step closer 

to expressing what needs to be expressed,

but is impossible to express. 

 

The grief has come, arm in arm with the fury. So as the politicians begin their avalanche of lies, the talking heads begin their empty chatter and the Facebook comments reveal our calloused hearts, I give voice to my Fury.

 

“Any citizen who dares to defend this action, to spin it, to ignore it,

to justify it, to refuse it, to shrug it off,

is not fit to claim membership in humanity.

If you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or other, you will be

denied entrance into your sacred buildings—you have defiled any god’s mandate to see the divine in all. If Catholic, you will be excommunicated.

If you are a teacher, you will be fired for violating the sacred trust of protecting children’s future.

If you are a politician, you will be impeached and taken from office for violating your oath to uphold the Constitution.

Family members who defend the Criminal-in-Chief will be struck from all wills, public figures blocked from all media, social and otherwise, spouses instantly divorced and prohibited from any further contact with the children.

 

Then all of you together will be locked into a football stadium or 100 or 1,000, 

to begin the education you never got or refused to learn. To finally look clearly at who we have become, and realize, once the lessons have begun, that it is exactly who we have always been. Consider the following:

 

• Our gifts of smallpox blankets to the native peoples who helped us survive.

 

• The brutal rapes and lashings of those enslaved human beings who made us rich. 

 

• The burning of those mothers who bore our children, denounced as witches.

 

• The assault and massacre of strikers who worked in intolerable conditions to give us warmth in our home.

 

• The church child-abuse perpetrated by those who led our worship services in the name of God, covered in the cloaks of institutional silence. 

 

• The lynchings and later, the sanctioned police murders, of black folks who gave us jazz, sports, literature, uplifted us with the moral courage of Martin and Malcolm and Fannie Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisholm. The endless list of innocents slain with their murderers mostly getting off scot-free —Tarika Wilson, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Breonna Taylor, Fred Brown, George Floyd and 583 more black people since 2010.  (Every morning, all in that football stadium will be required to say their names.)

 

• The slaughter of innocents abroad and our own young soldiers in needless wars 

  so we can claim the oil that mysteriously got in their fields, 

        the oil we need to drive to the mall that has defaced our own land 

               to buy products made in sweat-shops far away that no one needs 

                        and then fill up our oceans with unrecyclable waste. 

 

Perhaps then all of you who have refused history’s lessons,

 will finally understand that everything that happens like this 

         makes sense inside a narrative 

                that makes no sense at all. 

 

Now you just might understand that a human being who just wanted

      to raise her children with love, 

            write poetry to praise this life and

                  perform her duty as a concerned citizen,

                             has now joined the Ancestors of the Needlessly Slaughtered. 

 

While the leader who set this all in motion and approves it, will wake up the next morning in his defaced White House without a single word of remorse or condolence. 

 

Oh, day of reckoning, when will you finally come? How many more must needlessly die before we greet you?

 

 R.I.P. Renee Nicole Good."