for our people everywhere singing
their gospels and their rap, their blues,
R&B, and their jazz, their soul and their neo soul, all great Black music,
scuffling, scrimping, struggling to get by,
for our people working as wage slaves,
in collars blue, white, and pink, doing the best
they can with what they have, hoping
it will not be taken away with a pink slip,
a sudden slip from a parapet, on cement
into disability or welfare, or not,
hustling to keep from being crushed
on the unemployment line

for our people
for the way of years sipping summer from a tall glass of ice water,
buttermilk and cornbread out of a mayonnaise jar,
years testing watermelon, cutting s plug of sweetness,
knocking on the round or oblong to listen to the taste,
for the excellence of young boys running like they stole something
but only owing themselves and the strength in their legs
and. Girls who could keep up before breast held them back

for our people and red Kool-Aid days,
for smothered chicken and our cries smothered
in a world that did not adore us, but ignored us
or worse and ran us back on the other side of the viaduct
where we belonged, not in the wold world we could conquer
or excel in, giving the gated opening and tools for redress

for our people everywhere
growing gardens on vacant lots, training roses
and black-eyed susans and perennials in front yards, raking
leaves and shoveling snow, scooping doo and picking up
litter, washing and ironing out the wrinkles of everyday existence

for our people
running with nowhere to go, watching
television and movies looking for ourselves, searching
books and the nooks and crannies of history
for a glimpse of what was waylaid, and what is to be,
in barbershops and beauty parlors and ice cream parlors
and the stone faces in funeral parlors, picking up children 
from school from daycare, taking them to football, soccer,
baseball, tennis, basketball, volleyball, having a ball
at family reunions on Saturday nights

for our people who came in chains
tortured over turbulent waves, broken
hearted, and broken tongued, and broken magic,
broken bloodlines, strangled and whipped, distraught
and driven to the edge of the mind and beyond
for our people leaping to the sea, feeding sharks and myths and cautionary
tales, surviving the journey to reach auction blocks

a prurient pedestal for deposed queens, and chieftains, villagers
humiliated, abused, raped, and riddled with misery into
exquisite survivals, changing vocabulary and clothes, changing
into sleek panthers and superheroes, making the world safe
for demonstrations of protest and affection, all beauty and love,
scapegoated, pilloried, denied the excellence we bring

for our people grasping for gadgets and genuflecting
to electric celebrity, worshipping trinkets and noisome
symbols that blink and itch the eyes, gaming and gambling
and laughing to keep from crying, and crying laughing,
cracking up and falling out, drinking suicide, spilling milk
and blood, gunned down under lampposts, in playgrounds,
bloodied in drive-bys, in alleys, in living rooms, in bed sleeping

for our people bludgeoned by police and each other,
killed by presumptuous watchers, taxed for Black and driving while Black,
shot in the back, falsely convicted, sentenced to dwell alone, and
want to be redeemed, incarcerated in stone, tracked in department stores,
harassed, stalked in malls, and all the places people spend and sell,
our people selling loose squares, oils, socks and peanuts 
on the corners of our desperate longing, for hair, for nails, for body graffiti

for our people in the casinos, scheming in pennies from heaven
with one-armed pirates, dreaming in die and cards and  dealers,
dreaming numbers and playing them till they hit,
for our people drowning in spirits, burning throats and pockets
losing it all, spoiling livers, lungs, and kidneys, hearts with too much,
each of us addicted to drugs of fashion, to ancient hurt,
choosing crabs in a barrel or lifting as we climb, each one teach one

for our people who do not belong to me but to all of us for we belong
to each other, must hold each other in heart and mind
for our people in the citadels of learning and the one-room schoolhouse,
in the storefronts of funeral-parlor fans and the cathedrals of painted windows
and arched ceilings that lend toward sky
for our people in the baptismal pool, in white robes on the edge of the river,
for our people, chanting and  praying and hoping for a sweeter brew to sip and savor

let a new earth arise
let justice pour like trembling rain and mercy prevail as plentiful fields
let our strength be matched by vulnerable honesty of heart
may resilience be our guide, for we will stumble and then will rise
more able having fallen, more beautiful having met each other
along the way as we lifted each other up, hero-people who go out of their way
for love, and stay on the way of goodness

let our people be the people who remember and believe that love is all our
      portions
all our currencies and all are one, each of us injured or exalted, betrayer or 
      betrayed, muted
and declamatory, all one, each of us all of us, each private star beloved in
      the universe,
each of us creature of burdens and singing angel merged as one, alive and
      moving upward
holding on and lifting this earth, our house, precious and precarious, and
      God be our witness
between this gravity and this grace, hold tight and fly