TW: This poem contains a racial slur.
A few days ago in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
A young white supremacist broke into and desecrated an Indian restaurant,
Putting in an estimated $100,000 worth of damage.
“Trump 2020,” and “Fuck sand niggers,”
He scrawled in black graffiti.
One of these phrases he painted atop a religious tapestry,
An image of gods that had probably been in the family for generations.
Some wounds are incurable by money.
*
When I was in eighth grade,
I moved to a new school,
A private school whose students were competitive and had been reared from a young age
For greatness.
Feeling that I did not fit in,
I and a friend would sometimes use our free periods
To travel to the field,
Steal a field spike,
And tear apart sandbags with which the track team would cordon off boundaries.
I was never caught for this,
But it didn’t make me feel good.
*
Oh, baby white man,
Egg yolk of the universe,
You, too, have a history.
You, too, have a tapestry.
You, too, have mothers, fathers,
Brothers, sisters,
All scrubbed away and crumbled in the onslaught of a history that is not yours.
It is a machine.
It is alien.
It is alienating.
You are alienated.
That is why you did what you did.
*
Down at the base of things,
There are the ghosts of the ancestors,
murmuring lost truths, the pain of the forsaken.
Can you hear them?
God weeps for lost children,
Whatever color,
Whatever culture they may be.
*
With a mother, a child may grow.
With a father, he may become a man.
Motherless, fatherless,
We are all of us stillborn.
Jackson Holzberg Buckley 