Terrance Hayes - A Postcard from Okemah lyrics

Turned from the camera's eye, hovering, between river & bridge, the hung woman looks downstream, & snagged in the air beside her, the body of her young son. They are ta**els on a drawn curtain; they are the closed eyes of the black boy who will find them while leading his cow to the river bank; they are the bells that will clamor around the animal's neck when it lowers its head to drink. The boy dangles in midair like a hooked fish, his pants hanging from his ankles like a tail fin. On the bridge women pose in aprons & feathered bonnets, the men wear wide-brimmed hats with bowties or dungarees; there are three small girls leaning against the railing & a boy nestled beneath the wing of his father's arm. I count sixty-seven citizens & children staring at what must have been a flash & huff of smoke. The photographer must have stood on a boat deck, though from this angle he could have been standing on the water with his arms outstretched. He must have asked them to smile at the camera & later, scrawled his copyright & condolences on the back of the postcards he made for the murdered man's friends. "The Negroes got what would have been due to them under process of the law," the sheriff said. His deputy had been shot when the posse searched the suspects' cabin for stolen meat. To protect her son, the mother claimed she'd fired the gun. The mob dragged them both from the jail bound in a saddle string. If you look closely you can see a pattern of tiny flowers printed on her dress; you can see an onlooker's hand opened as if he's just released a dark bouquet. Now all of Okemah, Oklahoma, is hushed. Now even the children in attendance are dead. After that day in 1911, it did not rain again. To believe in God, this is the reckoning I claim. It is a Monday morning years too late. All the rocking chairs & shopping carts, all the mailboxes & choir pews are empty. I cannot hear the psalms of salvation or forgiveness, the gospel of Mercy. I cannot ask who is left more disfigured: the ones who are beaten or the ones who beat; the ones who are hung or the ones who hang.