W.J. Lofton’s visible poem We Ask For Fire is a strong work that partially displays on Breonna Taylor’s tragic demise by the hands of Louisville police.
Within the poem, Lofton repeats the phrases “the cops who murdered Breonna Taylor are at residence with their households” as protesters and justice advocates are left selecting up the items after the atrocious incident. It has impressed filmmaker Ava DuVernay to fee him to create one other poem surrounding police violence.
“I used to be deeply moved,” DuVernay tells TIME. “The concept that one artist was capable of unite a really placing written voice with a visible voice—a wedding of the vocabulary it takes to be potent in each kinds—was very fascinating to me.”
DuVernay, for her Legislation Enforcement Accountability Venture (LEAP), had Lofton additional his quest for fact surrounding Taylor’s case, and resulted in Would You Kill God Too?, which debuted on Sunday.
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Within the poem, Lofton asks a collection of questions to 3 Louisville Metro Police Division (LMPD) officers—Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove—who carried out a “no knock” warrant raid on Taylor’s residence final March. In the course of the raid, the officers fired greater than thirty pictures into her residence, killing the 26-year-old EMT.
“How do you clarify this to your youngsters?” he asks the officers. “Did you inform them the blood in your sneakers belonged to a Black woman, or is she not price mentioning?… God was within the room whenever you made a bloodbath out of somebody’s little one.”
“I wished to confront them like they confronted Breonna,” Lofton informed TIME. “It’s so necessary to continually identify the officers, so that they don’t get to return and simply reside their lives after they’ve taken somebody’s life.”
Watch the highly effective Would You Kill God Too? visible poem beneath.
