by L. Smith
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| Disgraced Minnesota police officer Kim Potter walked free from prison after serving just 16 months for shooting dead Daunte Wright when she mistook her gun for a Taser during a traffic stop. Potter, 50, was released from Minnesota Correctional Facility-Shakopee in the early hours of Monday morning to serve the remainder of her sentence on supervised release. —The Independent (UK), April 24, 2023 |
So, does time have color, too?
Why do they get less time for the same offense that, say, we might do?
Is their time more valuable than, say, mine?
I mean, ain’t we living on the same clock? Same timeline? Same century?
Maybe we need to leave the time up to the jury, because the judge is too easily nudged by emotion. Are you sentencing the crime, or are you sentencing the color? Are you sentencing the crime, or are you crying for a mother? Are you sentencing the crime, or are you sympathetic to the other?
Is one color more fragile than the other? You know the phrase, right? —"Don’t do the crime,
if you can’t do the time.” Does that not apply for every color?
What? Y’all think we got a time machine? Think time go by for us at warp speed?
Is time not supposed to affect the brother like it does the other?
Y’all don’t age the same, but them years don’t go by no faster for us.
We age on different scales, but them years go by the same.
I thought time was about alignment, about the crime,
about time to match the crime—not the color. Not how sullen one is once seized.
But it seems the brother gets more time than the other because of his color.
Does color determine risk? After all, who has the means to take the most risk?
The brother? Or the other?
Or is it: don’t do the crime, unless you got the right color?
I mean, can y’all meet us in today? Can we at least decide time like we living in the same decade?
Whose family will suffer most under the cloak of the time?
During the absences, the voids, the gaps, the setbacks brought on by the time? Whose family is already behind?
Why can’t white time and black time be on the same damn black line?
I didn’t know time had color, too.
I guess time, like fairness, are both abstract, are just a construct.
Time being obstruct for the fair-skinned,
abundant for the brother, but absent, lightened, or lifted for the other.
Intangible for the other, hard-lived for the brother.
Time itself is colored obtuse.
Color makes time profuse.
For the colored, time is abused.
And in today, time is a noose.
I didn’t know time had color, too.
And since it does, why can’t our time have the color of you?
L. Smith, a New Orleans native, is a writer, multi-certified, English and master reading teacher, who has freelanced for local newspapers. Her poems “Black Man Running” and “Worse Than Rodney King” have also been published in The New Verse News. She has an anthology of poems and prose set to publish spring 2023 that her mother and daughter created space for her to write. She also has begun this blog for writer teachers.