I wrote this poem on November 24th, 2014,
which was the night that the grand jury voted not to indict
Darren Wilson for shooting Michael
Brown, an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri.
And it was also the night that Obama
had awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
posthumously, to Andrew Goodman, who
was murdered in Mississippi.
He was a human rights worker, activist.
"A White Man's Wife Wakes Up in the Night."
It must have been lightning that roused me,
sent a thick-tailed nightmare scurrying.
City light around the shades reveals
what is and isn't here--
the husband's side of the bed made and waiting,
the city too quiet on this night of no indictment.
Don't say "cops," never "pigs," my father used to say,
shaking his head at the local law,
eating for free at the corner diner.
White husband out at what our white son calls a surf rock
concert with a white friend whose side of the bed
is also made and waiting.
What was it that woke me?
When I wonder, "are we the kind of people
to go down to Mississippi?"
there's a we, there's a they, there's a Mississippi that
is only in Mississippi.
"It took the deaths of two white men,"
said the brother of dead Presidential Medal
of Freedom winner, "to wake up white America."
But "we" is still asleep, still calling for peaceful protest,
when "we" calls for anything.
I imagine I love and unlove those
I love the way most wives do so late at night, so
many years into marriage.
But not when I walk scared and vigilant
down a city street and not alone in this bed.
Have I known what it is to live in a brown body, mother
a brown child, wait for a brown husband
to come home after dark?
There's that light again, which is not a squad car.
I am too certain my man will come home safely.
It's just lightning and no thunder, not even rain.