After Everything

"After Everything" by May

In the words of Kwame Ture: The Europeans took America through violence 

and through violence they established the most powerful country in the world. 

It is absolutely absurd for one to say that violence never accomplishes anything.

Sitting in the backseat of my daughter’s Benz, I tasted a margarita for the first 

time at 50. Happy hour, 50% off. Music hisses from the radio: The Backstreet Boys’

I Want it That Way, the kind of music my daughter listens to. My daughter who

wants to drive electric cars and buy 12 dollar strawberries and runs like an undercooked

egg, far away from her mother. 

& I would follow across lines that follow lines that someday stop without warning.

When she wants to move to big cities like Chicago and The Big Apple,

When she becomes a mother and leaves the coast and accuses you of 

stripping her of her brilliance, 

What brilliance?

She wants to start a studio with the money you made, wants to make a life out of

the dreams you discarded, wants to have a baby with a foreign man

pried from the pride of your skin.

After everything I’ve done, this is how you repay me? 

Before, this may have hurt me.

But I’ve been through far too much pain. 

Sitting in the backseat of my daughter’s Benz, I measure the distance between us

in inches and pounds, meters and miles. In a city of violence, I am a mother that 

blows through wind and blows through water, 

waiting

watching

following. 

Lines from “The Pitfalls of Liberalism” by Kwame Ture, 1969