Watching the flower-bedecked corset carrying George Floyd, towards his final resting place, close to his mother, in Houston, with nearly 6000 good souls of family, friends and strangers in attendance, young artist Gurleen Kaur, moved and pained at the cruelty, was screaming a watercolour painting ‘We can’t breathe’. World Sikh News presents this poetic tribute to a man, who in his death, filmed by a bold bystander has the potential to change the race equation in the United States of America, nay the world.

WHILE THE ORIGINAL IDEA WAS TO PAINT GEORGE FLOYD, but I found  hope in the picture and video where an unidentified Houston cop comforts 5-year-old Simone, who was on the streets with her parents to a protest against barbaric public execution of the family man George Floyd and asks him, “Are you gonna shoot us?”

The cop kneeled down and provided a loving hug to the child and said, “We’re here to protect you. We’re not here to hurt you at all. OK? You can protest, you can party -you can do whatever you want. Just don’t break nothing.”

This told me that all is not lost and maybe when the daughter of George Floyd grows up, the United States will be a different world and she will be able to carry on her footballer father’s dream, “I want to touch the world.”

During the protest in Houston yesterday one of the police officers noticed my daughter crying. She asked him “Are you gonna shoot us” he got down on one knee wrapped his arm around her and responded: pic.twitter.com/gQWF7HMf3l

— SimeonB 🦉 (@iamsimeonb) June 3, 2020

This is a poetic tribute to George Floyd and a thank you to the unidentified police officer who comforted Simone:

Cop from my vantage

Cop from my vantage
Turned upon the cop from Floyd’s vantage
Who dreamed of touching the world in his teenage
Pinned to the ground, asking air in impotence
When no one was of advantage
As he couldn’t camouflage
And become the one from the cop’s race.
Cop from my vantage
Was in the 9-minute coverage
Is that why,
Question, a young mind made
Was not at all strange
‘Are you gonna shoot us? ‘
Unforeseen, the answer to be a hug
And the impact his words made
Transformed the vantage.
Reminded me of the old adage
‘All the fingers are not the same.’