A white man's appreciation of "Reparations Now!" by Ashley M. Jones

Amidst a cloak of chalk-white

hands like to reach toward a foreign substance––

opening the pages of a book. This one here

telling me what it wants, or at least what I think it wants.

Maybe it wants my understanding.

Maybe it wants me to recognize something beyond my self.

Maybe it wants a personal check.

Who’d I lynch in the dead of night under a cock-eyed Moon––

blow-up in church from Birmingham to Kingdom Come?

Tell me–– to whom did I place my bid with little more than cheap

money at the foot of the slaver's block?

I did not hang Mary Turner upside down 19 and done–– burn

her dress down to her skin, cut-out the child from her shattered

belly and stomp it dead as death should not become;

shoot Mary Turner more than once maybe fifty times more

when the first bullet hit couldn't find its way to kill her again, then

bury her with her unborn there at the site. This site. The site

of murder one. Two counts. Unresolved. The cloak of chalk-

white clings like an indelible afterthought.

This book. This one here.–– I don't have money enough

to make sense of reparation. I wasn’t alive on May 19 of 1918.

If I’m guilty at all, I’m only as guilty as sin.