A Wolf Whistle

(poem“Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and waterlogged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son---lynched?”(Cozzens, 1)

--Manie Bradley, mother of Emmett Till--

A wolf whistle calls through the chilling silence,

The demise

Of a little boy choked by violence.

What’s that stirring near the river’s edge

The remains of little Emmett

Eerie, bloated and dead

His features are disfigured, his eye out gouged, a victim of the racist white man’s rage.

They pistol whipped him they weighed him down,

By a fisherman three days later his corpse was found.

With a bullet in his head, Necklace in a gin fan and barbed wire bound.

For a mother to see

It must've been like living a terrible dream.

Being able only to identify

Her child by an initialed ring.