THE TONGUE OF OUR PEOPLE
By Gary Johnston
“Oh Mary don’t you weep, oh Mary don’t you moan Pharaoh’s army got drowned…”
“The Mississippi drank itself one night”*
Katrina brings out the dead
The tongue of our people
Bitter as an old man
Who forgot he
Ever loved a woman
& All the generations later
We were not so much
Men & women
As fodder for the rain
But who pays the cost
When another mule
Is kicking in your stall
When the poor rat
Does not protect its own hole.
Along the Mississippi
A thousand bones
That we do not kill our people
So much as slaughter them
Scattered millions
Before the rising deluge
Houses marked one dead here
Two buried under mud here
Red marks on a ninth ward.
In the doors of no return
Bodies float low in the water
Another holocaust
Another betrayal of being sold
Down river for guns beads & rum
The murders we create in our name
Follow like carrion
The eye of the hurricane
Sweeps away nothing
Not ashes, memory
Or the dead of how
Many more to the water
& After the rain
Has washed away
The bayou, the blues
Will we remember
God gonna trouble the water…
Even if we does refuse da drown.
“Oh Mary don’t you weep, oh Mary don’t you moan Pharaoh’s army got drowned…”
*Owen Dodson
By Gary Johnston
“Oh Mary don’t you weep, oh Mary don’t you moan Pharaoh’s army got drowned…”
“The Mississippi drank itself one night”*
Katrina brings out the dead
The tongue of our people
Bitter as an old man
Who forgot he
Ever loved a woman
& All the generations later
We were not so much
Men & women
As fodder for the rain
But who pays the cost
When another mule
Is kicking in your stall
When the poor rat
Does not protect its own hole.
Along the Mississippi
A thousand bones
That we do not kill our people
So much as slaughter them
Scattered millions
Before the rising deluge
Houses marked one dead here
Two buried under mud here
Red marks on a ninth ward.
In the doors of no return
Bodies float low in the water
Another holocaust
Another betrayal of being sold
Down river for guns beads & rum
The murders we create in our name
Follow like carrion
The eye of the hurricane
Sweeps away nothing
Not ashes, memory
Or the dead of how
Many more to the water
& After the rain
Has washed away
The bayou, the blues
Will we remember
God gonna trouble the water…
Even if we does refuse da drown.
“Oh Mary don’t you weep, oh Mary don’t you moan Pharaoh’s army got drowned…”
*Owen Dodson
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