Systemic Sorrow Poem by Romella Kitchens

A Black woman and two children.
The realtors come through.
This will be big sale for them, a rental
like this.

They bring clients in while the woman
makes breakfast…
Clients in while she scans her trembling
cell phone looking for places to move to.

One looks at her child's donated laptop.
They pick up her Access card from the kitchen
table wondering if it has value or not…
What is its purpose?
They gather up her tears.
Her suffering and grow stronger from them.
People come through and steal clothes, shoes,
her paper towels, an engagement ring from better days, damn her for being on Welfare and hard, proud work.
Her children watch from the shadows and see
the conflict between their mother and
a society that disowns her and them.
A society that tries to makes them nameless,
faceless - easy to ignore and then relocate.

After a year, the siege is over.
The house was too old, too small, too something --- always something.
The house is no longer for sale.
Yet, vestiges of the siege still remain and still
pattern nightmares, memories, reflections, interactions with a world that assumes a lack of humanity in the human due to difference.
Vestiges of the siege still remain as instruction
as to how the world can be, how it has planned to
be and mercilessly will continue.