Shultz, He Took Your Life Simply for Existing

For walking, every morning, in the soft light of a new day. For crossing the street with your headphones on, with peace in your eyes and the calm stride of a man with nothing to reproach himself for. That's all he said, coldly, when the police asked him why.

« I couldn't stand seeing him pass by in the neighborhood every morning anymore. »

Scott Hilton, a forty-eight (48)-year-old Black American man, stabbed you without ever speaking to you, without knowing you, without reason. And that is how the inexplicable is explained: the hatred of seeing a free man, standing, alive.

For about a year, you had found a new balance here, in Philadelphia. You divided your life between your classes, your poems, and cooking, your other passion, that place of creation where you made flavors dance like words.

I can still imagine you in the warmth of June's Kitchen, apron around your neck, a calm smile, your thoughts elsewhere, where verses and dreams are born.

You were a poet of light, a teacher of the soul, a journalist of life. You believed in words as others believe in God. You thought that every sentence could soften the world. And then one morning, darkness took you without warning.

Since your death, the entire city seems to hold its breath. Philadelphia is cold. Your friends, your students, your colleagues, all speak of you in the past tense with the pain of those who cannot come to terms with it.

Shultz, you weren't looking to shine, you were looking to understand. You believed that every word could heal something in the world.

On social media, faces light up with your smile, lines tremble with your poems. Everyone writes to you as one speaks to an absence that continues to listen. And I wonder how a man can kill another man for so little, for nothing.

In this country where fear lurks under every porch, where difference sometimes becomes a target, your death speaks to the essential truth. Intolerance can be a commonplace crime, but it will never be ordinary.

You left as a symbol, like an open wound in the conscience of a society that forgets that living is a sacred right.

You leave behind an unfinished work, suspended dreams, and children who will have to be explained why a father can fall under the knife of a stranger.

You leave your students, orphaned of your voice. You leave your country, orphaned of a poet. You leave your wife, your three sisters, your three children, without your shoulder to protect them.

And you now rejoin your father, your mother, and your two brothers in that other light where hatred cannot enter.

There, in the traces of dawn, the words you didn't have time to write will certainly continue to follow you until the great morning.