Smoked into Spirit

 The New York Times ran a gut-wrenchingly sad story earlier this week about a Guatemalan woman who was shot to death in Indiana for mistakenly entering the wrong house. 

She was working an ordinary day on a cleaning job. But she accidentally tried to enter a house that was in front of the one she was supposed to clean. For her mistake, she received a bullet to the face. 

Her brother reportedly said, of her immigrant experience: "She thought she would have a better future here and give a better future to her children. But it was just the opposite." 

I thought then of all the other well-intentioned people who have come to this country over the decades to find opportunity—and instead—because of our infernal racism—found only a grave. 

I thought of the innumerable Chinese immigrants lynched or tortured in racially-motivated pogroms, in the late 1800s or the early decades of the last century—

People like "Yee Bow," the subject of Edgar Lee Masters's poem—murdered by a minister's son—whose headstone is forced to mourn: "Now I shall never sleep with my ancestors[.]"

I thought of Amadou Diallo—an immigrant from Africa whom NYPD officers shot forty-one times—killing him on the spot—because he reached for his wallet. 

As the poet Willie Perdomo wrote in a haunting poem about his killing: 

Before your mother kissed you goodbye

and blessed your dream to go make it in America

she forgot to look at the evening news

she forgot to tell you

that mosquitoes kill in this country [...]

Before you could show your I.D. and say,

"Officer —"

four glock clips went ahchoo

and smoked you into spirit

and by the time a special street unit

decided what was enough

another dream submitted an application

for deferral

That's what happened to María Florinda Ríos Pérez de Velásquez too, the 32 year old Guatemalan woman who was killed in Indiana.

Instead of finding opportunity and justice in this land of the free; she found a bullet to the face. 

Smoked into spirit. Another dream deferred. 

Now, like Yee Bow, she will never sleep with her ancestors.

Oh, who will break this country of its addiction to hate, to guns, to violence, to racism, to xenophobia? 

Who, to quote Vachel Lindsay, will "heal our everlasting sinfulness/ And make us sages with transfigured faces"?