Women's History Month: Lynne Thompson's "A Sadness for Sandra Bland"

A Sadness for Sandra Bland

Yellow from praying—

not from lemon nor from daffodil.

Always the whites surrounding the yolk.

Yoke of chain, of revolver,

shackle of never-ending.  Sandra turned

yellow from praying, from

pretending the war was done

in the South and in the North,

always the whites surrounding the yolk.

Yoke of fear, yoke of

tire-fire-necklace in South Africa,

her people gone yellow from praying,

questioning reconciliation & one day, we will

all be free and Sandra’s mother, too

is yellow from praying,

jaundiced by the deeds of cowards,

uncowered; needing to know why

the whites always surround the yolk while

her country fails to pray for the always yellow—

 © 2019 Lynne Thompson

BIO: Lynne Thompson is the author of Start with A Small Guitar 
(What Books Press, 2015) and Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press, 2007) 
winner the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. Her l
atest manuscript, Fretwork (2019), was selected by Jane Hirshfield for 
the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.  Recent work appears or is f
orthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares, Ecotone, New England Review,
and Pleiades.