Vigil by Charles Bane, Jr.

Vigil by Charles Bane, Jr. | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
On the 20th of January, 1942, high ranking members of the German government met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to plan the destruction of Europe's Jews.  State sanctioned, it resulted in the extermination of six million men, women and children. 
The impulse of racism in America—agreed to by the majority in an unconscious conference long ago—is  genocide. It's  evidenced by its targets and the legal instruments used to destroy. 
It is dangerous to advance nothing less as the root cause of deaths within the minority community, because lesser ideas will be grasped by the murderous to use as smoke, while they continue to hunt. They are driven, as the Nazis were who searched cellar and attic, by pathology.
White America is sorely deaf. It  does not hear gunfire, the grief of parents, or anguish from communities that are walled. And although community policing, class action suits by whole communities against police departments for terror inflicted, in addition to lawsuits brought by victims' families, are all appropriate, they are not the equal of what the slain deserve. 
What Michael Brown deserves, and John Crawford, Eric Garner, Jonathan Farrell and Trayvon Martin is a National Day of Mourning, on a weekday. The vigil would require that no one of a grieving People go to work, from technician to company president, from attorney to commercial pilot to zoologist.
The date would be as fixed as the unity of a Folk ever traveling to a place in the sun. America would largely halt. Headlights deserve to be put on that day as cars follow, in procession, the unsafe on every street. Grief for the innocent has never been more deep, but even deeper is the desire to have the spirit of the murdered returned to life by the recognition that no number of bullets are enough to extinguish those who, for right, advance.
At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blowYour trumpets, angels, and arise, ariseFrom death, you numberless infinitiesOf souls. --John Donne***

Charles Bane, Jr. is the American author of The Chapbook ( Curbside Splendor, 2011) and Love Poems ( Kelsay Books, 2014). His work was described by the Huffington Post as "not only standing on the shoulders of giants, but shrinking them."  Creator of The Meaning Of Poetry series for The Gutenberg Project, he is a current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida.