Reprinted from She Speaks Psalms       ISBN 1-60813-056-8

Ripping in the Village Street

Chasing gray haired women

Running in flocks after someone to beat

Young urban girls and young urban boys

Killing, maimed, and broken

Playing with guns like they are toys

Taken into Egypt again long ago

Brought into this North Country by ship

Chained, shackled, whipped, mamas couldn't see them grow

Stolen from the Ivory Coast

Sold for bondmen and bondwomen

Welcomed by an unsavory host

Urban youth hidden in prison houses

Standing at the heads of the street

On this corner and that

Filled with iniquity

Loved waxed colder than ice

His blood on the heads of the children of those

Who requested His life

Want no part in the blood of the lamb

Cursed in the city and cursed in the field

Called by this proverb and that

Won't sing John Newton's Amazing Grace

The anguish of stolen race whose children still won't obey

Vexed, rebuked, traumatized, devastated, perishing quickly

Wisdom or knowledge or understanding is far from their minds

Smitten with consumption and stricken with fever

Filled with violence and inflammation in the brain

Pursued by pestilence, disease, drugs, and sirens

Evil written in their heart and wretched controlling their minds

Immoral in the tips of their fingers and embedded in their toes

Children of the priests meant to be taught to lead

Born to gain skill in being head and born to access the Leader of the pack

Who gave His life     to save them    to protect them     to comfort them

Yet they can't passage the door where his comfort walks

They were conceived to be sons and daughters of kings and queens

Though removed into all kingdoms of the earth

Yet they are still dishonoring parents cut off before their prime

The source of a civil war and caught in a yoke that is not easy nor light

Children whose minds have been tainted and twisted

and seared and perplexed and ravished

by priests and teachers and mothers and fathers

and aunts and uncles and

those who were supposed to love them instead

Unrighteous and forsaken a seed begging bread

Using their tongues to call elders by names unseemly

Unnurtured misused ostracized misjudged abused ignored

Victims who victimize

Taint nobody's pleasure

A hot mess

Making their calling and election from this cause unsure

Refusing to honor the hoary head

Won't take part of in the Lamb of God

Terrorized, terrorizer, terrorizing, terrorful, terrorizes

The terror of Urban America

Unable to access God's good treasure

That's what's wrong with em'?

What can we do?

And how do we get them back?

Back to regal and grand

Back to a moral stand

Back to the rich righteous real reverenced revered Rock

Back to a noble stock

Back to what is good and true

Back to love themselves, each other, me and you?