Footnote to the centre

George Floyd is history.
He is now in history.

I never knew him
Was not related to him — like majority of the risen-up
people in the American cities, and elsewhere, on twitter or
social media.

George Floyd was a lie!
A lie of the American Dream
that enabler for the battered migrants and other arrivals and natives
dismissed as trash

George Floyd is a testimony to that lie, because his dream was denied
by a racial system and operated by the police as an instrument of oppression.

He was murdered by a white cop, whatever be the official version
of a strangulation in public,

simply due to a “wrong” skin colour
and a petty offence that did not deserve choking to death
under the knee of a hefty cop, on a street, before shocked
spectators.

The enforcer of law turned out to be a white killer!
The cop was also a lie to the system promising
Fairness, equity and justice.

Both unfortunate victim and killer
were brutalized by a society that talks of freedoms
and equality but gives them to the privileged few only.

Floyd is nobody,
he is everybody, subjugated by a bunch of democracy-runners,

the elites, corrupt, powerful, shameless.
He stands for everybody — denied dignity.
And human value for being poor and outcasts
of self-same society built on the labour of slaves
and migrants welcomed by the Statue of Liberty.

One day, these gasping Floyds of the world
will change history.

Sunil Sharma is Toronto-based senior academic, critic, literary editor and author with 23 published books: Seven collections of poetry; four of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel, and, nine joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism, and, one joint poetry collection. He is a recipient of the UK-based Destiny Poets’ inaugural Poet of the Year award---2012. His poems were published in the prestigious UN project: Happiness: The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, in the year 2015. Sunil edits the English section of the monthly bilingual journal Setu published from Pittsburgh, USA. For more details, please visit here Read other articles by Sunil, or visit Sunil's website.