Poetry

One

You do the math

They trying to divide us

Then subtract us

While we worried about multiplying our funds

We adding to the death rates

When will freedom come

For my brothers

I’m hollering one

For those mothers

With that hole in their soul

Because they once been told

Their child will never come home

Took by the system or the reaper

I like to share a story

That will allow me to go deeper

In Patrick Vill where I did my dirt

A fourteen year old boy

Rode his bike one night

With no fear of getting hurt

He flew passed Cypress Terrace

Loving the summer wind

As it breezed on his young black skin

When hit the corner of Thorncliff

There and then

A car hit him

The driver was rolling a blunt

While he drove

When he heard the thud

He panicked I supposed

All I truly know

Is that he drugged the poor boy

For three or four blocks

He had a car full of drugs

And he was wanted by the cops

So he felt like he couldn’t stop

I walked outside that night

But was forced back in

By the sound of sirens

Once the news hit my ear

From one of the young teen’s peers

I thought just the other day

He was around the way shooting ball

The way he laughed and played

I could tell

He didn’t know he was in his last days

If the news startled me

I knew it threw his mother in a maze

When the suspect

Finally turned himself in

I wasn’t amazed

I’m hollering one to him

Because he got a lifetime bid

Years to think about what he did

Yet the kid’s mother

Got a lifetime bid without her kid

Not even a decade and a half

Her son passed

I wonder if she blames

The drug dealer or herself

For the car crash

If it means anything to her

I constantly think of the last day

I dapped up her son

And threw up two fingers

And said one…

By Gerron DelValle