A Glimmer of Justice - L. L. Stamps

[Larry Robinson]

A Glimmer of Justice*

I remembered the day that my father asked me if I ever saw a 
Black man hung. He used the other word, all that Mississippi
writhing through his veins. I cringed. The very last time
he used that word, I left his house. He didn’t live to rue this day.

The ghosts of all those bodies swaying from trees, men and women sacrificed to the
strut and preen of white supremacy held in the DNA of the heirs to the
throne of injustice, as justice melts away, just ice.

Veredictum, to speak the truth, but whose truth—
that of the cop who genuflected at the altar of bigotry
and violence for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds
on the neck of George Floyd, a lynching some called it.
There is no law against lynching.

We have a verdict the judge announces as the nation watches
the split screen trained on his Honor and the defendant. The
jury is off screen. He fumbles with the envelope, his face
reveals nothing as he flips through the counts: second-degree murder,
third-degree murder, manslaughter.

In the streets, outrage and grief suspended, unrest on pause
the nation quiet with foreboding, hope dangling
on each verdict:

GUILTY

GUILTY

GUILTY

The jurors, four white women, two white men, and their peers,
three Black men, one Black woman, two multiracial women,
each one polled sound a chorus of certainty in their unanimity.

I watched the cop’s eyes flit left and right, left and right
his brow arched in disbelief, the entitlement shattered.
Does he feel the knee of law on his own neck or
imagine decades behind bars with all those men
sentenced to the chauvinism of bigotry?

The streets erupt in shouts. Strangers embrace. Tears bless faces.
The President calls the Floyd family. Pundits speak of true justice,
but the dead are gone. Yet, today a ray of light pierces the thick
smog of darkness that chokes the breath out of belief and change

until  . . .

	- L. L. Stamps


* The title is borrowed from the post-verdict comments
of Gwen Carr, Eric Garner’s mother.
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