No more eyes gouged from their sockets.

Your manhood whole again.

No one will harness you with rope, drag you

through mobs of colorless faces.

Here on this hilltop

are your new manifestations – steel coffers

six feet tall, hanging above us, heavy as history.

801 pillars in variegated shades of brown,

one for each county where thousands of your bodies

were made to die.

ξ

for drinking from a white man’s well

for demanding fair wages for mending a fence

for writing a note to a white woman

for standing on the wrong side of a street

ξ

4400 names etched in steel:

ξ

Near these monuments wooden shelves hold

hundreds of glass jars, each packed with dirt

from unmarked sites where you were dumped.

Under trees. Down rutted roads. In dark woods.

And in that dirt, traces of your bone and grit,

lifted by your children’s children, by cousins

you’d never meet, by strangers who needed to say

I’m sorry. Their hands driven deep

in tainted earth — to lift out the residue

of your life  and your life  and your life

to speak your names out loud.