Sorry White People

​The Saturday after our visit to the lynching memorial
and the night after watching “The Pilgrims” on American Experience,
we created a garden,
pulling ordinary grass grown too uppity for our liking
with its roots tangled into the stacked stone wall.
We eradicated, driving the hose like Bull Connor
down between the clumps to make our job easier,
tricking the grass to let go of its claim to the land
like real estate developers with the Gullah 
or William Bradford and Miles Standish with the Massachussetts 
before cutting off Witumamet’s head with bloodied knife
and talk of divine providence.
And so it pleased God to grow our garden
when the grass pulled loose to our cries of
“Free at last!  Free at last!”
and we tossed the galling clumps, radicals exposed to the sun,
into the compost bin we see as a symbol of redemption
for all vegetative transgressors,
completely oblivious to historical precedents.

                                                                  © Tess Lockhart,  all rights reserved, May 2018.