Mama … 

Let justice flow like a river and righteousness an everlasting stream

Was the Civil Rights prayer we heard from the lips of Martin Luther King

Yet, ‘We shall overcome’ turned into … ‘Mama … I can’t breathe’

8 minutes and 46 seconds ingrained in my head as the cities seethe

Shouldering the weight of injustice for 400 years who could deny or question their anger

‘Give justice and correct oppression’ is the rightful rally cry of their candour

We cry out for justice but the words are lost in the manifestos 

Still racial inequality gives birth to the angry chants from within the ghetto

From the protest March on Washington to the brutality at Selma in 65’

Question? When did YOU last March for your human rights to prove you are still alive?

The history books must be rewritten to speak truth to power without contention

When justice reigns again in the citadels of law to deliver truth and redemption

Man’s own ignorance creates injustice, when people make the choice to live in hate

So where is the debate to remove the weight, to promote integration and educate

He said taking a knee is unpatriotic, yet the uniforms take a knee on a black mans neck

As they nonchalantly gaze on with their hands in their pockets, fantasising about their next pay check 

He can’t breathe, can you hear them, get your knee off his neck and throat

As we watched the pathetic cost of bigotry towards a man and his 20 dollar note

It’s sickening, repugnant, an abomination to humanity

Yet the looting is named as the crime in the republican family 

In 39’ Billie sang of ‘strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees’

But the fruit lies low in the street now … as the new ‘sight see’

Is equality too much to ask for the people who built their country

Yet subjugation continues leaving many of their citizens hungry

We hear about justice and that all men are born free and equal

Its our human right we are told from that great American eagle

Now they refuse to sit at the back of the bus anymore

Based on the message loud and clear from Amos 5:24

From BC to 2020, the streets cry out for all to hear 

Make Black Lives Matter … because of those 400 hundred years.

Amos 5:24 (The Message)

‘Do you know what I want? I want justice – oceans of it.

I want fairness – rivers of it. That’s all I want’ 

Not everything that is faced can be changed

But nothing can be changed until it is faced

James Baldwin