Reprinted from She Speaks Psalms ISBN 1-60813-056-8
Ripping in the Village Street
Chasing gray haired women
Running in flocks after someone to beat
Young urban girls and young urban boys
Killing, maimed, and broken
Playing with guns like they are toys
Taken into Egypt again long ago
Brought into this North Country by ship
Chained, shackled, whipped, mamas couldn't see them grow
Stolen from the Ivory Coast
Sold for bondmen and bondwomen
Welcomed by an unsavory host
Urban youth hidden in prison houses
Standing at the heads of the street
On this corner and that
Filled with iniquity
Loved waxed colder than ice
His blood on the heads of the children of those
Who requested His life
Want no part in the blood of the lamb
Cursed in the city and cursed in the field
Called by this proverb and that
Won't sing John Newton's Amazing Grace
The anguish of stolen race whose children still won't obey
Vexed, rebuked, traumatized, devastated, perishing quickly
Wisdom or knowledge or understanding is far from their minds
Smitten with consumption and stricken with fever
Filled with violence and inflammation in the brain
Pursued by pestilence, disease, drugs, and sirens
Evil written in their heart and wretched controlling their minds
Immoral in the tips of their fingers and embedded in their toes
Children of the priests meant to be taught to lead
Born to gain skill in being head and born to access the Leader of the pack
Who gave His life to save them to protect them to comfort them
Yet they can't passage the door where his comfort walks
They were conceived to be sons and daughters of kings and queens
Though removed into all kingdoms of the earth
Yet they are still dishonoring parents cut off before their prime
The source of a civil war and caught in a yoke that is not easy nor light
Children whose minds have been tainted and twisted
and seared and perplexed and ravished
by priests and teachers and mothers and fathers
and aunts and uncles and
those who were supposed to love them instead
Unrighteous and forsaken a seed begging bread
Using their tongues to call elders by names unseemly
Unnurtured misused ostracized misjudged abused ignored
Victims who victimize
Taint nobody's pleasure
A hot mess
Making their calling and election from this cause unsure
Refusing to honor the hoary head
Won't take part of in the Lamb of God
Terrorized, terrorizer, terrorizing, terrorful, terrorizes
The terror of Urban America
Unable to access God's good treasure
That's what's wrong with em'?
What can we do?
And how do we get them back?
Back to regal and grand
Back to a moral stand
Back to the rich righteous real reverenced revered Rock
Back to a noble stock
Back to what is good and true
Back to love themselves, each other, me and you?
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