Nine Minutes & Twenty-Nine Seconds:
The Ignoble Made Noble
That Man there,
It began Ignoble,
It began Ignoble,
A neck beneath a knee
George’s requested breath
Pushed, suppressed, crushed, denied.
He gasped for help.
Then they called out for help:
“Hey there! Too much, Man!
That Man there, That’s a Man there!
Don’t you care? . . ."
Then despair.
For the Man died before their eyes.
Before the media,
before the crowd that cried aloud.
Now it’s before the World, the act ignoble.
George lay still on Black death’s sill.
One by one the protests came.
George Floyd becomes a refrain,
A new Emmett Till,
Policing never to be the same.
His macadame-pocked face
Appears on poster, fence and wall,
A wail to hell.
His death asks out loud,
“Why? Why?”
Again, the crack of Black pain
Calls for any fleeting justice.
Nine Minutes & Twenty-Nine Seconds,
no, nine times ninety-nine eons,
the cry!
But this time the scales shuttered
Moved.
His face gives noble grace . . .
For Justice replied.