[Mpls] A poetic response to violence on the North Side of Mpls

[Shawn Lewis]

A poetic response to violence on the North Side of Minneapolis
by Sondra Hollinger Samuels, Community Activist, Mother, Poet 


From my porch, on my predominantly Black, poor, and 
urban block I watch.

I watch the wonderment of the wind giving birth to 
movement yet remaining unseen.

I watch the lightheartedness of birds busily creating 
home structures with twigs and finding perfect perching 
places yet being completely liberated from worry and 
fear about tomorrow.

I watch the silent strength of trees standing sentinel 
over our lives yet never intruding nor being preoccupied 
with what we think of their presence.

I watch and I muse, “Can God use nature to teach us to 
mourn? Cause we need to mourn. We must mourn.”

We must mourn because on Friday of last week 
Frank Haynes, age 21, and Raliegh J. Robinson, age 68, 
were gunned down while innocently dinning in a neighborhood 
restaurant. They weren’t together. They just shared the 
wrong space at the wrong time. Both were Black men murdered 
by a Black man. 

We must weep because less than a week before, another 
Black man was shot to death by yet another Black man.

We must cry out because days before that, a different 
Black man was bludgeoned to death by a different Black man.

We must mourn because all of this tragedy was quarantined 
in my predominantly Black, poor, and urban neighborhood 
and it happens in every major city wherever there is a 
bevy of forgotten and despairing Black young men. In our 
urban woods they are hunted and slaughtered by other 
Black young men whom themselves become lost to us for a 
hunting season
sometimes forever.

I watch and I muse, “Can God use nature to teach us to 
mourn? We need to mourn. We must mourn.” 

As an act of perpetual yet ineffectual mourning, some 
of us in the, “hood,” have learned to anesthetize the 
acute ache and suffer the unspokenness of silence. We 
often over-drink, over-eat, over-drug and under-care to 
hide the hole in the soul of our community. This vacuum 
is empty, soiled, and like the earth, deep. And although 
the pain is so intense, so unrelenting, we don’t know how 
to mourn- really mourn-for others-for ourselves-for sustained 
periods of time, over time, so that heaven might hear,
 respond and impregnate the earth with our deliverance. 

Maybe God can use the unfathomable wisdom at work in the 
lives of the wind, birds, and trees to teach us to mourn so 
that the unbroken flow of our salty tears might water the 
earth under our collective feet. 

Maybe our rain of sorrow can feed the soil producing a 
flowering of hopefulness, beauty and unbounded new life. 

Maybe then it will be springtime in our community, our city, 
and from nature we will have learned to mourn and as a result 
to reap a great and precious bounty.

Posted by Shawn Lewis, former Field Neighborhood resident

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