Familiar Fruit

There is something awful

About that tree

Something dark

From memory

A familiar fruit

Swinging in the southern breeze

Smelling of Skittles

And history

A familiar list

Ten miles long

Talked about in schoolbooks

Bled about in Songs

These hands did not plant it

My ancestors did

Build a white picket fence

Leave a bloody kid

Hard to leave the tree to rest

Should have chopped it down

Gorged on plates of apathy

Now the gunshot sounds

The memories come flooding back

Generation after generation

Filling my ears with horrid things

The sound of degradation

The colors are not blind

Neither are the people

Two hundred years

Still not equal

So it remains standing

On others broken backs

Swinging red fruit

It is time to lift the axe