Meditations In An Uncertain Climate: United In Our Roots

Can we get back to our roots — when the staccato notes of a wailing guitar spoke life and when we learned of three little birds on a door step in Jamaica?

Can we do the tribal dances of our ancestors — where Transatlantic shackles are unfamiliar and the ambient air doesn’t choke lungs and hopes and dreams?

I imagine a train that is painted with red, black and green symbols riding high above the common ground with clear glass windows that show heads rocking back and forth to Motown tunes.

I can see fists in the air as full afros sway like improvisational jazz notes that teeter the lines of insanity and force light with scatting and jazz chants.

Like juke joint nights, trap kitchens create blues — the new enforced visions of our reality that handicap communities decorated in high melanin tones.

Like Chernobyl — death lingers in the air on city streets where leaders were chopped off like Kunta Kinte’s foot, ordered by masters in big white houses.

I hear the drum — muted in the distance, struggling to play the notes that mother nature intended underneath the industrious sounds stemming from battered hands of slave labor.

I smell catfish — cooked by church mothers at the Friday fish fry, turning poor fates into soulful gatherings where negro spiritual tunes feed the multitudes.

Beneath the facade of the American Dream, I imagine black families toiling at the soil, reaping the benefits of their calloused hands through generational wealth.

Beyond the tinted skies, I see Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Fred Hampton Jr. and the Black Moses around delegation tables like Greek Gods and Goddesses Zeus, Aphrodite, Iris and Athena.

I remember when 9–1–1 was a joke in our towns; then 9–11 fed the historical trope of nationalism and hysteria that continues the “othering” that keeps fertile lands a continuous war.

I recall the sounds of gunshots on Chicago corners, sprung from the black hands whose ancestors were forced into war — a sound and grip more familiar to us than freedom.

Is it us they hate, or is it the overwhelming feeling of generations of red, teary eyes staring up in triumph having crushed traps and impossible barriers?

What does reckoning look like in a society where juxtapositions of reoccurring power themes and conflict go unchecked — unresolved?

Can we get back to our roots — where Queen Nefertiti reigned amid the ancient pyramids before her bust became a human spectacle of reverence and sentiment in opposition of the current descendants?

I want us to dance, sing, shine, and play retro tones on the chromatic scale, penetrating time and holding hands like timeless freedom fighters underneath tunes of ever-present rejoicings.

Can we get back to our roots?