The Silent Watchers

We saw it coming.

Whispers in daylight, the rise of hate, racism,

We always knew.

The media?

Tiptoeing around truth,

worried about losing sponsorships

more than losing souls.

They choke on their own cowardice

while truth burns, silent, unseen, unspoken.

Before the nazi salutes,

before the symbols returned, we felt it.

Subtle, creeping, casual cruelty in every word,

every refusal to see.

A joke here, silence there.

“Shit hole countries.” “Good people on both sides.”

It wasn’t a surprise.

For those whose history has been written in chains,

in segregation, in the weight of a thousand generations,

we knew the story wasn’t finished.

The pages weren’t torn, just waiting. Curled in silence,

ready to be read again by fools who forgot

that racism doesn’t die, it adapts.

Waiting for silence to break, for the past to return,

wearing a new mask, smiling for the camera.

As if they hadn’t seen the poison seeping in,

hadn’t let it fester, until it burst like pus into the light.

Now they stand in the wreckage crying crocodile tears,

pretending they didn’t see it coming.

Shaking their heads, bawling,

as the world wakes up to the nightmare

we never… stopped… living.

— By B Bailey