A Mother's Burden

Here is something I want you to hear, white people.
You... are free. But we... are loose.

These are the words of a mother,
whose daughter crossed the sea
to lay down her life
for a wretch like me.

And she's conflicted.

Conflicted that we print the
swim times of the kid who
raped an unconscious girl
behind a dumpster,
but when a black man
is shot for owning a gun
and uhh... well, he looks
a lot like our suspect,
with that wide nose,
we print his record
and mine his lifetime
for proof of his errors
to justify state-sanctioned
execution.

Which is another way to say,
we comb for clues to their humanity
so that we may fully dehumanize
the dead.

So yes, she is conflicted.

She puts her life second
below the nebulous crib of country
and risks for
all names, sorts, types, tracks,
all religions and notions, occupations,
all strata, all shades, all distortions.
Though they call the same place home,
she comes home conflicted.

Majored in psychology,
been serving overseas,
and still I can feel that 
they hate me.

And in the supermarkets they follow me.
And in their homes they chastise me.
And at traffic stops they are allowed
to kill me.

That confliction, I cannot grasp,
laying your life down for folks
who can't look past your skin,
while somehow still refusing to see it.

I have not wrung this out
to counter guilt, or feel better about it,
though I'm not convinced that
writing is ever anything else.

I am sharing a story of a woman whose name I missed,
who spoke with the strength I know comes from
living and battling a life that I could never measure,
about her selfless daughter who could someday
die for us conflicted.