Chen-ou Liu's Translation Project: First English-Chinese Haiku and Tanka Blog

Friday, February 17, 2023

A Damn Thing Tanka

written in response to Democracy Now, Feb. 16: "Buffalo Supermarket Shooter Gets Life in Prison Without Parole for Racist Massacre"

the mass murderer
turns away from her stare ...
you don't know
a damm thing about Black people
we're human, our kids go to school


FYI: Simone Crawley, granddaughter of shooting victim Ruth Whitfield: “We all know the pure hatred and motivations behind your heinous crime, and we are here to tell you that you failed. We will continue to elevate and be everything that you are not, everything that you hate, and everything that you intended to destroy. … We are extremely aware that you are not a lone wolf, but a pawn of a larger organized network of domestic terrorists. And to that network, we say, 'we as a people are unbreakable.'