Beloved Of God Poem by Patricia Spears Jones

Dixie cups and bullet marks—a man's body gone to the morgue,
tiny bombs exploding limbs, organs. Bullet marks and Dixie cups.
A winter scene suddenly hot with summertime choler.
A young man's gone to Paradise.

His body is bomb site.
His assassins out of breath, out of control, out of depth.
What was there, what scent? One night
one light going out, one noise that did not sound right.

41 bullets across the plane of his body. 41 bullets scattered dust and the smell of snow.

Alive, thinking about what-the rent,
a party, the pretty girls that did or did not smile his way.

Then the fusillade.
Amadou, Amadeus, Beloved of God. Gone to Africa, back to glory.

The fusillade . Beloved of God. Young men, young women shout your name.
Justice plucks off her dirty blindfold, joins the hue and cry.

Beloved of God. Prince of the city. Scion of Africa.
Sweet face. Hardworking. Laughing. Friendly. Biding his time.

Dixie cups cloak the breathe of damage, the depth of duty
four white men walking away. Alive. Bullets spent

What rent their good sense from finger on the trigger?
The easy gift of gun and badge?

Light bulb shatters. Someone falls as if shot. Another shoots
and this young man whispers I am free here. I am free here.

His mother will bring her sweet voice, her steely spine and her beautiful angry eyes
to bear on the city he had grown to call home. Beloved of God. Bombed body.

His father will shelter his final journey back to Africa in a shroud of pride and rage.
Beloved of God.
Gone to glory. Gone to Paradise.

Away from this most predictable of American stories-e.
41 times across the hardscrabble of a Bronx street, bullets patter

like marbles, four killers walk away, tears in their eyes, perhaps.
Justice , re-knots her dirty blindfold across dull eyes,
giving them room to breathe—
A Black man dead,
Four white men walking home
again.