Stations Underground: The Greatest Friday

By Tai Amri Spann-Ryan

Yo your laws

Have passed us over

You call us brothers and sisters

But our ancestors were called a scourge

Disinherited

Dispossessed

Wretched

Betrayed

You fell asleep on our needs

Now the reaper comes

But here

Hear my guilt

There was no way to freedom

So we built stations

Seven in number

Live from the underground

Straight from the sewers

Live from the underground

Straight from the sewers

Live from the underground

Straight from the sewers

Live

Station 1

See my street clothes

Meth mouthed

Track marked

Youth excommunicated

Fire and brimstoned through the system

Pastor’s kid

Abomination

Found family

In non blood

To stay alive and thrive

Station 2

You was my ally

Marched left and right

By my side

But when ICE came knocking

You didn’t know my name

Station 3

If I were to say

There was a priest

Who sells clean souls for a profit

And preys on the young

And a politician

Crying, “Pro-Life!”

For lobbyist payouts

Who’s to say

I wouldn’t get the electric chair

While private prisons get Swiss accounts?

Station 4

I’m purpled

Like a stranglehold

The beating gotten when I don’t follow massuh’s edicts

The beating when I do

The Black girl

8 times more likely suspended than her White counterpart

Wet’suwet’en

Jailed in pipeline legislation

Carlos Gregario Hernandez Vasquez

Collapsing in captivity

Queen Candy

In a hotel room

Station 5

Carried Guadalupe

Tattooed on my back

Carried a cradle over the border

Carried a coffin back

A slave sent

To pick my strawberries

No soap

Just bags to carry

No amount of oxy

Can erase the memory of a child

Separated

I carry the loss

Of 9th great grandparents

Removed

To a southern slaughter

Station 6

In Juarez

There is a femicide

When we think of our own oppression

In St. Louis

All COVID-19 deaths

Were Black

But the news

Won’t show

What’s through the torn veil

Station 7

Women

As usual

Are the ones who see the truth first

That there’s nothing inside

The promises are hollow

The Dream’s infected

Death’s a cycle to life

That when they buried us

They didn’t know we were seeds

Dark Prophet Poetry Challenge Day 6: holy week or The Beggar Woman

On Tuesday, April 7th, I was riding my bike under a bridge when a spray painted message caught my eye, and inspired a poem. The words said:

Gotta get to it

Before it takes over

In the book of mark

Can’t tell Jesus nothin’

Unless your a beggar Woman

Waiting for your crumbs

Slapping the patriarchy

Back into reality

And questioning an overbearing god

On his people skills

For the win

Even in this college town

There are Tent cities

And beggar women

Waiting to slap you back into reality

Dark Prophet Poetry Challenge Day 5: Yemaya and Oshun

Space

The ocean is mother

These are the ways of dark caves in the sea

Black king Olokun

Your daughter is life

A blue maraca

Over waves

Omio yeye

Ebbo Fi Eboada

Yemoja please speak:

From time immemorial

My sister Oshun

Kisses salt in sweet water

Her mirror shows beauty

Her hips sensuality

Her lips sooth the demons

And her knife slices too

If I call her here lightly

Your honey will form

But first

The salt dies on the leaf

Snails say that humanity runs short

The source in the wells

Needs tapping

The root needs water for survival

You heard

Your judgment day

Is to resurrect grandmother wisdom

And throw way the patriarchs of greed

Plunge hands in soil

Drink Springs unplasticed

Breathe air for transmutation

Sharpen mind like bullets

Remember for nine months

You swam in MY oceans

So now when you feel it

Call out my name

Oshun

She has suffered

She knows we all we got

She broke your waters so you could be baptized in air

Her Queendom is of 

The honey cultivated

When she gave all she had

So that humans

Who have forgotten the labor

Of growing their food

Might not starve

So that separation

Between the natural

And the human

Would reverse

And that humans might see

There is no shelter

From what we are

The disease

And the cure

Ashe

Dark Prophet Poetry Challenge Day 4: Behind the Door

i

Went down to the crossroads

With banjo in hand

Told my old lady

I’m going to see the man

Dressed in black and red

Cigar dangling in his mouth

A fist full of rum

Stank of that dirty, dirty south

I’ll call him by his true name

Elegbara of the path

If he accepts my chicken

Well now you do the math

Turning in a spiral

Kisses on the neck

Shouts to the heavens

He slips me a blank check

Cause I’m a holy roller

Got the mojo in my pouch

Yes I’m a holy roller

Not trying to be no slouch

Oh I’m a holy roller

Mojo in my pouch

I’m a holy roller

Not trying to be a slouch

ii

Now that the way is open

Broken bones

Everywhere

A death rattle

A baby chokes

An ICE agent turns away

A homeless family

Locked in cordoned white tape

Elegba in rags

Elegba in the soft skin of a babe

Elegba collapsed in ventilators

Elegba

In our sickness of greed

Warrior behind the door

When the streets of Yorubaland

Go silent

And South America bleeds capital

Can you take this offering

And tell our ancestors

We’re sorry

We didn’t mean to squander it all

And if we pour out a libation

Can you tell us the way home again?

ashe