My heart is full of deep, unbridled, tender and forlorn sadness.  I feel an unfamiliar bone trembling when I think that an 87 year old, African American woman was shot in cold blood, for doing and being what Black women have been doing for centuries to save our collective souls.

Kind and loving hearts whose prayers lit our pathway to freedom.

I see his face but will not speak his name, but I know the petri dish and all of the elements that likely helped to “grow’ him.  Patriarchy, power, white supremacy, militant terror, scheming, and hatred.

The unthinkable and unimaginable has happened.  And here with me is a rising form of psychological hunger, a wanting of human kindness, compassion, and gentle understanding.

Tears that fall down my cheeks become like streams searching for a mother river.  I cry for all of the ways that we have tried to voice are pain, through words, through dance, through hymns, through protests, through silence, through carrying signs, through law suits, through chants, through the sweat of our bodies.

I will not sing hymns of heritage that are cloaked in lyrics of hate.

I ache for these lost lives, like dying grass aches for rainwater.

I want time to reverse itself.