#vikinglife,
my college student responded after reading
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s letter to his son
that describes beatings from Baltimore police
& his own father, how everywhere
he turned, his body was a flesh-
eating target. Oh well, history is full of violence,
my pupil continued, entering
his note of discord into the conversation.
Today, as workers jackhammer asphalt in D.C.,
that hashtag rattles in my mind, for I recognize
its steel resolve fracturing the mural’s
bright bones, like the baton that broke
John Lewis’s skull in Selma—bloody, bloody
Sunday—and here, bloody Monday—
what day of our history escapes unscathed?—
on Tuesday & Wednesday,
the race massacre in Tulsa, complete with planes & dynamite;
on Thursday, the lynchings of Black boys in Indiana;
on Friday, Lincoln’s mass execution of the Dakota tribe;
on Saturday, the kidnapping, the beating,
the shooting-in-the-head, the wrapping-barbed-wire-
around-the-neck, the tossing-into-the-Tallahatchie-River
of Emmett Till, 14 years of age, Mamie’s son, Coates’s son,
American son—
& today the President scrubs Harriett Tubman
from government sites—when will we learn?—
the more we try to erase, the more we excavate,
laying bare our white-washed tombs full of violence.