This poem was written by Rochell “Rodeezy” Hart for Sundiata as part of the Sept. 22nd Day of Poetic/Hip Hop Action for Sundiata Acoli. It responded to the prompt Sundiata created called Senses of Freedom: “What would freedom look/smell/taste/sound/feel like after the revolution?”
September 22, 2014
© Rochell D “Ro Deezy Hart
“… and then I woke up”
© Rochell D “Ro Deezy Hart
A response poem for the Sundiata Acoli Campaign show, responding to the question, “What Will Freedom Look like after the Revolution”
It was a beautiful day
‘round my way
Little pig tailed brown girls double dutchin on the block
It’d been years with no news of an unarmed black man gettin shot
By the cops
Who, by a power that only could be divine
Had managed to straddle that line
That made them human again
Officer friendly no longer a fallacy but an actual was a community friend.
The only traces we could find
Of a school to prison pipeline
Were in books documenting the oppressive history
Of the poor and of the people who looked mostly like me
But that reality was long gone
And now revolutionary freedom songs
Were school anthems and an allegiance was pledged
To the blood that had been shed
In our journey.
And then I woke up
Like what the F—k
We still marchin and protestin
Civil unrestin
Routinely, unarmed, gunned down
Oscar Grant, James Jahar Perez, Mike Brown
Kendra James
My pain
Is the same
As those chains
Because we aint free
I see the pictures of history
Concurrently with present reality
Kimani Gray
I fight and pray
For a world where your story
Does not exist
Until then, I fervently resist
Timothy Russell
I struggle
To fight back tears,
137 rounds by Cleveland Cops is what ended your years
And you, like all the others, were armed only with your skin
Just like Timothy Stansbury Jr., Brooklyn, pigs acquitted, AGAIN
Not to mention economic oppression and the war on drugs
Ha! Let us arrest and detain the real thugs
29 members of Congress accused of spousal abuse,
21 are current defendants in lawsuits,
But their hands are up so I guess they didn’t shoot
The fire next time has arrived in a Ferguson blaze
For the first time in a long time, the path is tangibly made
For change
Warriors ready to ride
To the other side
Of freedom – more than in a social context
Freedom, built on mutual humanness and respect
Freedom, built on the eradication of all oppression
Freedom, where the dream of that
beautiful day
‘round my way
Can manifest
Freedom, where my soul can rest
While living
Til then
we will keep giving
‘em hell
Rebel
With every cell
Until
The sun of true freedom, rises.