BLACK FEET a poem

I read a post from Lady Kinks along with a video of a young girl getting a beat down because of her hair (dreads). Kids use to fight about shoes and clothes and boyfriends and girlfriends, now they fight about hair. We need to get ourselves together. Check out one of my poems to be part of a larger group of work.

BLACK FEET
by Dorothy Guyton

Move fast black feet Master needs a refreshing drink
He awaits the arrival of the cold well water
Keep your black feet moving no time to rest or think
Aunt May is chopping cotton - so is your six year old daughter

Move fast black feet to quickly birth your slave baby
One day in bed a luxury; back to work, back to misery
Recuperation denied; a gift from God to only gentility.
With coarse matted hair and dark brown skin oh no you be no lady.

Move fast black feet the Baskerville hounds are on your scent
Keep pushing on to the promised land where you can be
A free black person no longer for sale or rent
A place where big noses and lips are treated with humanity.

Move fast black feet stand in indignant lines to protest
Your right to be counted, to vote for president
Still learning to read and spell to speak in lingo eloquent
Rising each day free to give and to strive to do your best.

Move fast black feet its time to go to college
To sit where science, history, and math are being taught
To enter into that new Garden of Eden ; price paid claim your knowledge
Through blood shed and tears ran cold it was earned and bravely fought.

Move fast black feet the nameless bullets are whizzing by
Innocent life struck down on streets by thugs
Fueled by lack of inner pride and puppet string sold drugs
Black feet survived so much to live- forget and now dishonorably die

Move fast black feet to remind our people of the refashioned sanitized past
To tell them freedom is flighty and doesn’t always last
To remember black feet toiled, moaned and prayed once upon a time
Against the stripes upon their back and their sale for not a crime

Move fast black feet to righteous protest to the picket lines once again
Raise voices and hands that loudly ask can your greedy eyes see black me
We all have fought to live and to forever live life self determinedly free
For every ethnicity of people who ever claimed to be your brother - human

Move fast black feet for while all of you slumbered and slept
Jim Crow’s Law came back into today it stealthily Santanly crept
Nappy hair, monkey brains is the story now being told
Back to the bidder’s block, Look! A Negro is being sold.

When we allow ourselves to be caught up in the small things of day to day life we lose sight of the bigger picture. Last Friday I saw a flyer on the courthose bulletin board asking for volunteers for the Mississippi Militia to be ready to fight terrorist foreign and domestic. Wake up young and old before you are just another pair of black feet.