NO! NO! NO!

except for this poem:

read it AFTER listening to the song of the same title as interpreted by Nina Simone (imo, Billie Holiday’s version is CRIMINAL in comparison!!!)

Strange Fruit

I was out in the early evening, taking a walk in the felds to chink about chis
poem I was writing, or walking to the store for a pack of cigarettes, a
pound of bacon. How quickly I smelled evil, then saw the hooded sheets ride
up in the not yet darkness, in the dusk carrying the moon, in the dust behind
my tracks. Last night there were crosses burning in my dreams, and the day
before a black cat stood in the middle of the road with a ghost riding its
back. Something knocked on the window at midnight. My lover told me:

Shush, we have too many stories to carry on our backs like houses, we have
struggled too long to let the monsters steal our sleep, sleep, go to sleep,
But I never woke up. Dogs have been nipping at my heels since I learned to
walk. I was taught to not dance for a rotten supper on the plates of my
enemies. My mother taught me well.

I have not been unkind to the dead, nor have I been stingy with the living. I
have not been with anyone else's husband, or anyone else's wife. I need a
song. I need a cigarette. I want to squeeze my baby's legs, see her turn into
a woman just like me. I want to dance under the full moon, or in the early
morning on my lover's lap.

See this scar under my arm. It's from tripping over a rope when I was small,
I was always a little clumsy. And my long, lean feet like my mother's have
known where to take me, to where the sweet things grow. Some grow on
trees, and some grow in other places.

But not this tree.

I didn't do anything wrong. I did not steal from your mother. My brother did
not take your wife. I did not break into your home, tell you how to live or
die. Please. Go away, hooded ghosts from hell on earth. I only want heaven
in my baby's arms, my baby's arms. Down the road through the trees lye
the kitchen light on and my lover fixing supper, the baby fussing for her
milk, waiting for me to come home. The moon hangs from the sky likea
swollen fruit.

My feet betray me, dance anyway from this killing tree.

Foot notes
1. The title is from a song by Lewis Allan, often sung by Billie Holiday.
2. For Jacqueline Peters, a vital writer, activist in her early thirties, who was lynched in Lafayette, California, in June 1986. She had been working to start a local NAACP chapter, in response to the lynching of a twenty-three-year-old black man, Timothy Lee, in November I985, when she was hanged in an olive tree by the Ku Klux Klan.