Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me: the Black boy yearning to breathe free, called Bastard by the mother with skinny dreadlocks — the child with two last names. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me: the five year-old yearning to breathe free, washed up on the shore of the sun’s unknown border, threatening death with a poor man’s wet birthright in his righteous pocket. The man with a twisted tongue sings scales of independence without the papers to prove his God-given freedom. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me: the grandmother with a yellow yarn tote bag strapped to her back, yearning to breathe free. In the wooden boat, she crosses her fingers and wades in water so she can finally visit her sons and daughters. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me: an aging friend pledges allegiance on the American side of the bankrupt wall with sack lunches of sardines and justice crackers, drinking communion wine from an unsaved pool of blood-drenched water. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me: an African yearning to breathe free — she wears neat cornrows and glittery barrettes to the public school. She ladles immigrant’s stew at lunchtime, is taught to carefully swallow the substance of life that bellows down the stomachs of babies with plump, distended bellies. Oh sweet land of liberty, we shed our tears to thee. Yearning to breathe free, loosening the noose of white guilt, protesting patriarchy, waving the red, white, and blue stars and stripes, standing in the kitchen of thieves holding a charity plate. Hot cooking grease burns in an unseasoned cast iron pan next to a bubbling, boiling pot of crowded collard greens. Unprotected ancestors’ American Dreams steam on the contrite stove of gas lighters — origins of people not commonly given a seat at the table of equal rights. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me: you and me, we both yearning to breathe free. When the sheet music dreadfully harmonizes the stanza that becomes a keening song, the slave owner who becomes his own slave taking a last lashed breath, hearing no sound, because there is no sound left to hear.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.