Another nameless prostitute says the man is innocent.

• Author: Espada, Martin
• Position: Poem - Cover Story

--for Mumia Abu-Jamal, Philadelphia, PA/Camden, NJ, April 1997

The board-blinded windows knew what happened;

the pavement sleepers of Philadelphia. groaning

in their ghost-infested sleep, knew what happened;

every black man blessed

with the gashed eyebrow of nightsticks

knew what happened:

even Walt Whitman knew what happened,

poet a century dead, keeping vigil

from the tomb on the other side of the bridge.

More than fifteen years ago,

the cataract stare of the cruiser's headlights,

the impossible angle of the bullet,

the tributaries and lakes of blood,

Officer Faulkner dead, suspect Mumia shot in the chest,

the witnesses who saw a gunman

running away, his heart and feet thudding.

The nameless prostitutes know.

hunched at the curb, their bare legs chilled.

Their faces squinted to see that night,

rouged with fading bruises. Now the faces fade.

Perhaps an eyewitness putrefies eyes open in a bed of soil,

or floats in the warm gulf stream of her addiction,

or hides from the fanged whispers of the police

in the tomb of Walt Whitman,

where the granite door is open

and fugitive slaves may rest.

Mumia: the Panther beret. the thinking dreadlocks,

dissident words that swarmed the microphone like a hive,

sharing meals with people named Africa,

calling out their names even after the police bombardment

that charred their black bodies.

So the governor has signed the death warrant.

The executioner's needle would flush the poison

down into Mumia's writing hand

so the fingers curl like a burned spider;

his calm questioning mouth would grow numb,

and everywhere radios sputter to silence, in his memory.

The veiled prostitutes are gone, gone to the segregated balcony of whores.

But the newspaper reports that another nameless prostitute

says the man is innocent. that...