Bury Your Idols

 Bury Your Idols

(“The Lord God is my strength. He will set my feet like the deer. He will let me walk upon the heights.” Habakkuk 3:19)

Tonight more blood stains the streets
while the entitled
use our children for target practice.
Tonight more mothers cry to the sky
helpless as
ducks in a shooting gallery.
Tonight more people
used their rights
to suspend righteousness and
pave the footprints of cowardice;
oh people of pretense, get on your
feet and walk where too many have fallen.

Look in the caskets.
A long, painful, life-shattering look at
what the masters of violence have wrought.
Can you still identify them by their faces,
can you?
Can you tell who died first or last,
or who never saw it coming?
Can you, just this once, learn the sculpture,
the art,
the hard, fucking casualties of your
complacency?

Don’t tell me how high you have walked.
I want to know, has enough blood soaked your
sneakers? Has enough flesh been torn from
bony limbs, enough bodies ripped to shreds?

Don’t tell me you’ll pray. Don’t say it.
Don’t tell me God is your strength
if you’re too weak
to turn your hellish idol into garden
tools.
Don’t tell me how much it haunts you;
get off your pious ass and learn the ways of
the Spirit, the Mother, the Daughter,
the One attacked from womb to Golgotha
with the weapons of institutional anger.

I can’t stand to see another fundraiser,
I will not let your group wash my car.
I can’t stand to see another shirt that proclaims
devilish schemes in the name of
the one who rains on the just, the unjust,
the crust and the bread. Cry

Out.

Raise your voice. Speak up. Loudly.
The voices from sod and pavement
will not wait for you to call another vigil.
Find the words from the
God

Who refused violence, who died for friends,
foes, dust and the earth.

Bury your idols and
let the children live.