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