Tonight I Lay In My Bed Listening

This is something that I originally wrote in I think 1999-2000.  I recently found it and updated a few lines to make it current..  Its a little dark, but a lot of my poetry tends to be more on the social commentary side.

Tonight I Lay In My Bed Listening 

by Lisa Robinson 2000

Tonight I lay in my bed listening.

Listening to the sounds of a woman.

She screams, this woman. Somebody’s mother, sister, daughter, lover.

I listen as she screams. Screams for all of the things that were…but will never be again.

She remembers

Remembers perhaps, the first time she touched the tiny brown face and looked into his eyes.

She remembers those first unsure steps, the first cry of “Mama”….she remembers the baby.

She remembers the tears on the morning he first began school, and the laughter as he returned home.

Maybe she cries for the times of pain – cries for the bruises, skinned knees, maybe even broken bones. All of which will heal in time.

She cries for the boy

Maybe she cries for the pains that will not heal. For the time that her child, who has been loved and adored since birth, came home and asked “Mama, what is a nigger?”

She cries for the time that his heart has been broken, the pain of a first love.

She cries for the pain, the anger and frustration he feels, every time he “fits the description” or “she crossed the street and clutched her purse when she saw me”.  He is becoming a Black Man

She cries for the simple irony of it all. That someone who came out of an act so beautiful, so tender and loving…could be taken away in an act so UGLY, so VIOLENT so HATEFUL!

He will never hear her cries! 

He was somebodies father, brother, son and lover.

She cries because she knows this. He has been taken away. Never again to be held, kissed, caressed or told “I Love You”

Tonight I lay in my bed listening to the cries of a woman. 

It is me; and I’m crying for all of the mothers who have lost a child.