You fell and the world fell with you. Look at all you have accomplished, dust. Look at all your great fire raging at the emptiness of space, ash. A flicker, a walking shadow, a desolation wind. See you on the shady side of the wall.

Into another time we passed and made our marks on the backs of your fathers, your brothers and sisters, mothers, and all kin. Sold, enslaved, we marched you and yours back and forth, from hearth to heath, field to farm, and bled a nation dry. Bled a people dry. We are truly humbled by our own participation, but how can we say we are sorry?

Our mouths now grind the grist of our brothers' labor. You were we and we were ours, our own, our owned. We were slain and brutally raped, murdered and tortured, but we were not you then, and that was the condition. Our eyes now feast on the fruit of our sisters' labor. She was her and they were them and us and we have been too fortunate. Some have been more fortunate than any heretofore, and some have seen the glinting end of the knife in the dark. You have wept more bitter tears than any and we have not exhorted you to bring your struggle to light. We have held back more cries of mercy than befit a civilized people, we have held back more howls of adjudicant rage than should be ever wanted. Our ears have gone deaf, says the man, "to the screams in the South." WE were US and all encompassed. Your lives, he says, "and my life will never settle."

In my time I have never held a man in captivity, never bound a man to another, never held the single key to manacles by which I could free a man. No whip brandished, no assaultive words to replace a tired beating. Instead I have blended in, ignored conscience. Remained silent when by all rights I had reason to shout, "Injustice! Oppression!" God help me but I am young to regret so much. For what reason could I have ever stopped a bus, set a fire, drowned or hung a man? We have seen so much in your years, and our years have never done right by you, as if we traded. In my time I have been a coward, in my way I have been despised. We were bred for luxury and pacific mutability, sponges. We multiply and can hardly be killed, but are most useful in our deaths. In my time I have never felt more than shifts in temperature and salinity. I am divided, multitude, sepulchrous.

How can I be sorry for being born? Shall I lament, uncreate myself? Do I tear at my clothing in a display of shock and horror, a lacerated beast at last? To whom do I owe this pleasure, you who have seen little of your ancestry? Are we all now bound? For where?

And in the hour of dying we are all our own lives. In the day of our deaths, nothing seems to be wrong, worn-out, or sharp as it could be. In the season of your last breath, may your cold winds blow as cold as they may ever blow, and your warm winds temper you rather than keep you weak.