A Poem to Juneetenth

Thru the longs hours
We have waited thru long nights
1619. The White Lion
July 9th 1860
The Clotilda

Today
The Clotilda lies rotting on the Mississippi

Oh, oh, oh, let my people go
Oh, oh wont you
Oh, oh wont you
Let my people go

Four hundred years
Four hundred years
Four hundred years
Four hundred years

Won’t you
Won’t you
Let my people go
Nguni Bantu
Umbuntu
Kimbundu
Kikongo
Sassa
Uhuru Sassa
Let my people go

Sankofa yeah!
Yeah
Yeah
Let my people
Oh Mythic bird
Come ah
Let my people
In Angola
In Ghana
In Nigeria
From the southern sea
To the great Atlantic
Won’t you let ma people go

Oh Bantu Children
Atavistic people
Beat your drums of Paradise
from Dahomey
beat you drums of paradise

Four hundred years
Two million Africans
Lost on the Middle passage

Beat your drums of paradise
And from this great wound
And from this unhealed wound
Your crimson blood
Form the river of redemption
Be Uplifted on this day
Oh Frederick Douglas
Say
Up ye mighty race!

And thru it all
We as a People shall
Yes we are Journey
To the Promise land called
Freedom

Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom got a long chain on
Oh long chain
Freedom is a heavy load
Freedom is a lonesome road
Freedom got a long chain on
Anywhere the people be enslaved
Anywhere they lay uncounted
In Unmarked graves
Still freedom

Freedom road
Freedom road
Heavy load
Heavy load

If you see humans in cages
On laden ships
Inside barbed wires
Behind high walls
High fences
In dungeons
And imprisoned
Occupations
Invasions
Slaved in labor
And in worth
And in chattel
Raped
Disfigured
Branded
Sold
Owned
Plundered
Terrified
Undignified
Murdered
Freedom got a long chain on
Ethnic cleansing
The Atrocities of holocaust
Genocide
Ethnic cleansing
To be stymied
To fester
From the wound
To be unrecognized
Denied covered up
In a stench of history modal crime
How then
Can we be free

I will leave you in a preponderant of names
Dates
And places
For together it makes the language if the disposed
Together it will lead You into the truth of this history
And still it is a human history
Its truth will lead Us on
To Uncover the fuller meanings of our Journey

I entreat you
To come the the Table of Reconciliation
Confession
The great unfolding
The perpetual listen in Songs of our story
And to tell the Story of
How we Got Over the Mountain
To tell the story of how we overcame
Oh my sisters and my brothers
Won’t you come
Oh my people
Wont you be free

Jamestown
Fort Monroe
Hampton Virginia
The Ship
The White Lion
Africa Town
Alabama

The Ship
The Clotilda
Umbundu
Ndobgo Angola
Ubuntu
Sankofa
Kimbundu
Dahome
The Congo
The Akhan
Ghana
Her Golden Coast
Nigeria
Western Africa.
The Coromante
The Fanti
Yoruba
Kiswahili
Igbo
Ile-Ife
Asante Sana
Nana
Nenneh
The Atlantic Sea
Chattel Slavery
The Mississippi
The Congo River
Congolese
The Waki Sangoma
The 13th Amendment
The Southern Confederacy
The Cotton Gin
Plantations
Planters
Indentured slavery
Massacres
The burning of Cities in America
Sherman’s Army
Union soldier
Cotton
Slavery
institutional Slavery
The Union Army.
Texas
Virginia
Massachusetts
Buffalo Soldiers
Indian Chiefs
Slave Auction
Plymouth rock
Slave Market
Faneuil Hall slave market
South Carolina Slave Market on Bay Street.
Emmett Till
The Mississippi Boys of freedom Summer
Jim Crow
Huey Long
The white Supremacist
White Nationalism
The Ku Klux Klan
Infiltration
Castration
Mutilation
Lynchings
Homewood
The Letter from the Birmingham Jail
John Brown
George Wallace
Andrew Jackson
Abraham Lincoln
Indian Reservation
The Cherokee trail of Tears
Wounded Knee
Port Confort
Brazilian Slavery
Sugar
Sugar plantations.
ice plantations
Japanese Internment Camps
The laying of the Railroads
Desecration of sacred monuments
The plunder of Native Languages
The Naming
The unnaming
Sally Hemmings
Tituba
Phyllis Wheatley
The Slave Narratives
Cotton Gin
Nat Turner
William Lloyd Garrison
David Walker: The Appeal
John Brown
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gabriel Prosser
Denmark Vesey
The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy
The assassination of Floyd Hampton
The beatings if Fanny Loy Hamer
The Assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr
The beating of Rodney King
The death of Dumas
Michael Stewart
Malice green
Orlando Castile
Michael Brown
Travon Martin
Russell Means
Waco
Osage Avenue
Ruby Ridge.
And the lynchings of thousands of
African American
White American Families
Men women and Children
The disappearances
The body parts taking from gruesome murders
And are being kept as Souvenir
Stop and Frisk
Reconstruction
The Massachusetts Regiment
The Appomattox
The Louisiana Purchase
The Prisons
The Military Industrial Complex
Voter Suppression
The Death of the Voting Act
Monuments of the Civil War
Vietnam.
The 5 Axle of Evil
The Longest War
The cybercWar
The Cold War
Pandemic Sars 19 COVID
600.000 Americans lay dead and Counting.
The Rwanda Genocide.
Inequality
The theft of Native Land
The plunder of our Lives.
The pain
The difficult remembering of ancestors

Malcom in his grave
Tamir in his grave
Too many Patriots are dead and gone
Too many dreams are being denied
May we celebrate today
A history

Thank you Lord
I am no more a Slave.
Thank you Lord
For saving Us.
Thank you Lord for this day.
To all of Us
Love and Peace.
Nay we continue to grow
And heal as a Nation
Tho’ painful rugged and sorrowful it may be.
Courage will bring us grace
And her lasting peace.

Cry my beloved country
America
America
What you are to me!

 

Poet Deta Galloway is a self-described “Multimedia Artist, whose other pursuits include, painting, music, storytelling, professional dance, photography and ceramics. She was originally born in the Jamaica West Indies who emigrated to the United States at the age of 18. A professional nurse, she currently divides her time between Massachusetts and Georgia.