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One of this poem’s central thematic concerns is American racism and its effects on individuals and society. Clifton does not shy away from the violence of white supremacy and the gory results. Instead of using euphemisms or figurative language to disguise the unpalatable events for her audience, Clifton describes the murdered body directly in the first stanza. By including details of the historical hate crime, she forces the reader to look at its brutality: Byrd’s arm was “pulled away” (Line 3) and his now-speaking head was decapitated and “hunched in the road” (Line 1).

In her second stanza, Clifton uses the speaker’s voice to express the rage of Black people as a whole through unanswerable questions that lament, give philosophical context to, and consider the future ramifications of racism and racist violence. Clifton confronts the dominant majority’s failure to address the behavior and ideology of men like Byrd’s murderers, instead of asking victims to forgive and unite. She questions the meaning of humanity—is there such a thing, when three men can treat another man with such dehumanizing horror? The last question, asking about the speaker’s daughter, draws attention to the legacy of racial violence and the resulting generational trauma.

The poem’s last line, where the speaker states that he is “done with this dust” (Line 16), alludes to the famous opening image from Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise,” in which Angelou’s speaker responds to racism by saying that “You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I'll rise,” and to Jesus’s words on the cross. This suggests that Clifton sees Byrd’s death as the martyrdom of an innocent man while rejecting the expectation that victims of racial violence react as a docile Christian should. In Clifton’s poem, the speaker, as a representative of Black Americans, is “done” (Line 16) with being abused and murdered, suggesting that a more active approach to addressing racism should be taken now.