YOUR BROTHER’S KEEPER.

Am I my brother’s keeper?

Is the question we all provide

to Creator God when

we are responsible and trying to hide,

the simple truth covered by our invention,

that we have done our brother in.

The problem with the question

is that blood cries out from the ground—

there is no divinely deaf space

where injustice does not resound,

and shake awake God’s attention,

like a burnt sacrifice on a high place.

When we sat for a pint

and you told me your dad

actually cut down a lynch victim and had

first hand experience of Able’s murder,

I wept publicly I could not contain,

my exposure and decades of national pain.

Racism is the great Achille’s heel

that haunts our land and lives

and is the root of all that’s wrong— and we feel

things could be better by far.

But we bury the truth in a dark question:

Am I my brother’s keeper? …You bet you are.