Trial by Conscience

I   Indictment

Wrestling with family histories
exhumed in genealogical digs

darker plots found entangled
within slavery's iniquitous web

muted now are heroic imaginings
of long-ago ancestor stories

escapees from brutish poverty
in perilous, ship-tossed transits

come to hack out autonomous lives
at edges of Edenic wilderness

obsessed to own new-world land
free from British feudal bondage

clans patrilineal and matrilineal
settled on unclaimed tracts

in South Carolina's piedmont
and on North Carolina's coastal plain

there seventeen family households
traded their souls for immoral gain

reaping cash from tobacco and cotton
with labor of African-American slaves

starkly tallied in national censuses
from 1790 to emancipation

catalogued as well in estate accounts
and wills as only first-name chattel.

II  Mea Culpa

Now I know...now I know
this inhumanity taints my blood

I must and will bear witness
against this past abomination

I acknowledge, regret, abhor
all hurtful, humiliating acts

wrought with despotic white-power
by my slave-owning forebears

as their present voice and conscience
I offer too-long-withheld remorse

and posthumous apologies to Sissyfus,
Mosley, Berry, Wade, Reuben, Hannack,

Rebecca, Sara, Long Jack, Short Jack,
Cindia, Mattie, Haywood, Lucy, Annie,

Sukey, Dinah, Caster, Rouse, Gatsey,
Dick, Sohee, Old Titch, Jimmy, Rose,

Judah, Moses, Winne, Esther, Cato,
Abraham, Peter, Sarah, Lyd, Phil, Boe,

Nelius, Sam, Clary, Beck, China, Ben,
Patience, Dave, Fanney, Bob, Hannah,

Punch, Amos, Jacob, Little China, Tom,
Poll, Washington, Daniel, Nelly, Rachel,

York, Avey, Noel, Lewis, Dave, Elveda,
and all the unknown, unnamed others.

III  Verdict 

Be it affirmed and declared again
in the name of all Humanity

here to far-distant, global places
for now into the enduring future

all people of any gender and color
are of necessity created Equal

endowed with certain unalienable,
secure, unequivocal, categorical,

protected, defended, inviolable,
absolute, immutable, sacrosanct,

self-evident Rights of Life, Liberty,
and the protean Pursuit of Happiness.