Running Together

If you want to know why we’ve not achieved, to your standards, ask yourself.

What have we been doing with our best years?

What have we been doing with our childhoods?

What have we been doing to guard what is left?

What have we been doing with our voices, our pens, our stories, our genius, our bodies, wrapped in our color?

What?

While you’ve been achieving, we’ve just been trying to run. We can crawl, some of us. Others can walk. Most of us have canes and wheelchairs to get around. Our two feet, they’re tired, weary, deformed and weak, despite our prowess, you might say, on the field — any field. The grass, the hardwood, the battleground, the sand, the mud, the concrete, the gridiron.

We all get around, for the most part. But none of us can run.

Running, for our freedom, and yearning, for equality under the law, is not allowed in our nation, it appears, for us, even now.

What more can we do? We’ve given all that we have to the nation. Every single day. Every drop. And it seems that all that we have left is an ability to drip fear, anxiety, and trauma across our generational DNA.

And even with that, even acknowledging that, it seems that our cries fall on deaf ears, our tears, on blind eyes. Many do not want to delve into the context: historical, cultural, or intellectual. All of that seems to be unwanted, from you, even now.

We’ve given all that we have to the nation. We’ve kept us together — the nation. We thought it was for all of us, but maybe, it was just for you.

We’ve kept us together even while we’ve torn ourselves apart.

A few of us even got on a horse and rode through the nation, telling everyone that would listen that the British are coming.

**We got on a horse, some of us, and rode through the nation, telling everyone that would listen that the British are coming — but then we’ve now come to realize that the British were actually you all along.**

We tried to warn you. We tried to tell you, enough. Please. Enough. At certain times, we thought we’d be okay, that we could exist together, but time and time again, you showed us, maybe, it’s just not possible.

We screamed — we cry, we kneel, we whisper, we write, we sing, we march, we die — we get on our horses and we ride, and we say — and we have said for years that the British er ah coming!!

We have been the patriots of this nation; our nation. The soul of this nation; our nation. It’s beating heart.

We have been the fighters to set the captives free.

But, it’s too heavy a burden to bear — and we did it, for the most part, alone.

We set you free, and you free, and you free, and you free, but not us. We are still in chains while you look upon us in shame and disappointment, bewilderment, even.

You look upon us like a son that looks at his mother’s clothes after she’s given him everything, and then he says, why is your dress so dirty? I worked today, son, so that I could provide for you. Clean your dress. You’re embarrassing me, says the nasty, ungrateful son of the nation.

We were the captains willing to go down with the ship, to save everyone else, first; we saved everyone and everything, but us, but no more.

If you want to know why we’ve not achieved, to your standards, ask yourself.

Don’t ask us.

We are riding into a new day, a new dawn, getting off those horses, because, we are all running together, now.