WE SEE YOU
Golden Shovel with credit to
E.E. Cummings’ “Buffalo Bill’s”
So much loss and we can’t say how
it will ever be okay. What the good folks will do,
your leaders, well they don’t care about you
especially the big guy. Us brown, us poor are like
barn cats, we cry and yowl, fight for a piece of your
peace, your ease in a world where your boys in blue
hunt us for sport and the rest just watch wet-eyed,
say glad that’s not my crushed neck, my boy.
No cure for this plague, but we see you Ma’am, Mister,
bible in hand. Ain’t it your god has you burnin’ after death?
—from Rattle #73, Fall 2021
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Angela Decker: “I wrote this last year, when there was attention on the ongoing racist killings of Black people and the disproportionate Covid deaths of people of color. The single E.E. Cummings line, ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death,’ seemed to fit in regard to our leadership at the time. Terrance Hayes’ Golden Shovel is a favorite form, offering a great foundation and an ideal container for what would otherwise have been an angry, weepy rant.”
