Strange Fruit, 2020

content warning: lynching, police brutality

A man was lynched today
And like Strange Fruit
He swung in the breeze
But in the distance
A low baritone voice,
Strains I can’t breathe. 

Your pale ears didn’t hear it,
Because you know peace.
But me? We?
We know no peace,
Because of police.

A man was lynched today,
And he looked a little like me.
A version of me that
Could be in my fate, my destiny…
A mini me.
A 10 years into the future,
A bundle of Brown joy,
A present.
A post 9 months gift
From the omnipresent.

A man was lynched today
But yesterday,
He was just a boy.
A son,
Playing with his toy… gun.

A man was lynched today
And my heart was cinched away.
Syrup slips from the trees
As his blood drips away.
This tree bears a strange fruit
As his oak skin begins to decay
A man was lynched today
Publicly was his
Body left for display.
His dignity,
His life,
Stripped away.
A man was lynched today
By police.

There is no federal law against lynching.
It is legal.
For plantation police,
To squeeze and trigger release rounds
On my Black body.

A man was lynched today,
And Billie Holiday
Sang this haunting song
In 1939.
It is 2020,
And a man was lynched today
Whose skin looked just like mine.

Author’s Note: I wrote “Strange Fruit, 2020” during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests when a man was lynched. For weeks I had been carrying a sign that read “A man was lynched by police today” to pay homage to the many signs that were carried some 50 or so years ago. However, at the time, I meant it in a symbolic manner. The Black and brown bodies bleeding out in the street at the hands of racial injustice is a direct parallel to those who were lynched. Until it was 2020, and a man was lynched.