By Michael Tyler, EJS Poet-in-Residence
Every day, I feel its mass with compressing concentration;
Every gram of degradation in every ounce of defamation,
For every pound of condemnation of a dark discrimination.
Each morning that I rise, I must begin my preparation,
To brace my aching back for the daily tribulation,
To haul the debilitating load of my social alienation.
There is no exaggeration, to this candid attestation,
About the heavy humiliation of existing in this nation —
To bear the domination of my second-class designation.
Also, I must tow an armor-clad self-preservation,
Worn by every generation trained by hate and trepidation,
To battle all allegations against our worth and reputation.
The burden has not been eased by any just consideration,
For a must-have alleviation from a must-have reparation,
To get a reconciliation for every egregious violation:
The consequence of colonialization;
Each genocidal occupation;
Pride lands stolen by confiscation;
Every effort for eradication;
The chains and whips of subjugation;
The toll of kinship separation;
The selling of our valuation;
Each virtue-stealing sexploitation
And monkey-tail dehumanization;
All the lies of emancipation;
Our country’s caste indoctrination;
The Jim Crow days of demarcation;
Every night-stick altercation;
The sundown fate of segregation
And our redlined isolation;
The covert plots for sterilization
And Nazi-like inoculation;
Our label-dashing hyphenation —
But still no equal education;
Every strange-fruit strangulation
And falsely-framed incarceration;
The moral failings of a Christian nation
And its white supremist reprobation;
Every media fabrication
And bias-born misinformation,
And Eurocentric adaptation
In every cultural appropriation;
The many ways for skin taxation;
And all anti-civil legislation.
At birth, I’m given this bootstrapped sack,
To carry upon my infant back.
It’s the cultural weight of being black.
Author’s note: “There is a litany of violations listed towards the end. I wrote them in 29 lines. I did this purposely to connote a leap year, as determined by having a 29th day in February, Black History Month. It’s a cloaked commentary on the pace of Black progress — seemingly one year to every four years of White advancement. A weighted pace is greatly slowed.”