Lamp Post

Lamp Post
There are times when we are defined as who we are and we are shaped for the rest of our lives, by a moment. There are times when in our personal  history the truth comes to us with clarity and precision and has a lasting impression that marks everything we do from that point on. Sometimes these moments also define nations and the shape and substance of their morality which defines their future and creates or destroys hope.

It was hard getting up in the morning,
The wild Alabama air thick with the songs
Of birds, the fall canopy of trees
Burning kaleidoscopic with the wild
Colors of autumn fire,
But everyone had to go to school
And I was of course, no exception.

So I threw on my pants, hastily tied my shoes,
And tumbled down to breakfast.
The smell of flap jacks saturated everything
And bacon popped and crackled
In a black skillet
Under my mother’s careful
And studied machinations.

Breakfast was swiftly dealt with,
There was the token kiss
And fathers important shuffling of the paper.
Then to the door, its hinges sighing
To reveal a panorama of the character
Of fall.

Past the homes on our block
I almost ran, the fences lining the alley
Pointed towards the main street
And then the park.
One time last week
A guy yelled at me
For drinking from the fountain
Marked “For Negroes Only”.
But when you’re thirsty
Who reads signs?

Still it left me wondering
Even today
How drinking fountains
Could ever be given
The power over a nation
Of free people
To define class
And consequently shape futures
While dictating who hopes
And who despairs
In the “Land of the Free”.

It was along the street
Behind the tire factory
Where the large industrial light poles
Pointed at the sky
With their unblinking eyes
Looking down into the empty street
That I saw it,
There in the quiet morning
Before the milk man came
Ratting and clicking up the sidewalks,
Before the paper boy
Hurled today’s news
At silent early morning porches

I was standing in the street
Just behind the blustery wind breaks
And dangling swings
At the far borders of my school’s playground.
It moved very little,
Turning slowly
Within the circumference
Of a small
Restricted arch.

Its head was cocked slightly
The rope taut with its weight.
When I approached it
I moved around it
In a circle.
The skin on my hands
Chilled.

The eyes were carved out of the skull
The nose removed, the ears missing
Making the head a curious football.
Dark red spots peppered the skin skiffed
With a light gray dust
The hands and feet
Were bound
The face bloody and swollen.
A gathering stain spread like a purple flower
On the material of the overalls
In the area of the crotch.

Pinned to one bloody strap
A sign lightly flicked in the wind.
It said:

“This is a good nigger”.

I stood there for a long time
Watching stray breezes
Twitch and flutter
About the dead man
Hanging from a factory street lamp
Early in the morning.

I remember
Thinking what it would take
To hate someone so much
You couldn’t just kill them
You had to take away their eyes, ears and nose,
You had to castrate them, riddle them with bullets
And then tag them with a racial slur
Hanging them up in the middle of our town
Like a cat drags something onto the porch
To share with the family.

And I remember sitting on a cinder block
And looking up at him
As the morning sun rose
High above the tops of trees
On fire with Fall colors

And I cried.

Hours later
After I had managed to shuffle
To my first class
Looking absently at the chalk board
Hearing the soft scrape of the chalk
Across the rasping blackness
The teacher telling us
How the United States was born
From the heroic efforts of people
Wanting freedom, willing to get it by all costs
And support that with nothing less than their lives

All the while
I could see the man dangling from that street lamp
Superimposed in my childish imagination
Over the draped flag of our nation
A symbol of this great country
Flowering up in every class room
From east to west
A flag to which we pledged every day
As the future inheritors of
The greatest country in the world.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.

Psalm 51:


Freedom

Banana And Strawberry Milk Shake     Ingredients:2 ripe bananas, peeled and sliced10-12 frozen strawberries, sliced½ teaspoon vanilla extract3 cups milk chilled3 ½ cups vanilla ice creamHow to Make:1. Place bananas, strawberries and 1 cup milk into a blender and blend until smooth. Add vanilla ice cream and vanilla extract, with the motor running, add remaining milk and blend, until it is thoroughly mixed. 2. Pour the shake into the glasses with a straw. Serve immediately.


It was Sunday morning after church
And I was ready for strawberry malt.
I went down to Seagram’s
And with my nickel
Made my way to the counter.

I was small
And got past the people there
With little effort .
They were all gathered
At the end of the counter any way
Around two people.

They we taunting them,
And mussing their hair,
One of the girls had a bow pulled out
And someone replaced it with
Thick strawberry malt.

I saw that the black girl
Had spent a lot of effort getting ready
For her time at the counter
And her friend, (a white boy)
Was being punched
Until he bent over from pain
His head and shoulders
Streaming strawberry malteds.

Among all the taunts
And threats
Someone hissed,
“What are you doing here nigger?”
And the girl, daubing malt and tears
From her brave dark eyes said

“Freedom”.

It was at that point
That I slid my strawberry malt
Across the counter.
Back towards the astonished
And angry face
Of the white counter waitress.

“What’s wrong with you boy? Ain’t it good enough?”

I told her
It wasn’t worth the price.



The Riverside Church
“A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, ‘This is not just.’”
Martin Luther KingThe Riverside Church in New YorkApril 4, 1967

It has been years since
American streets
Heard,
The bark of police dogs
The tearing rip of fire hoses
The screams of people
Crushed under the piercing torrent
Of angry water.

It has been years since
Martin Luther King
Rose up on the pulpit
At the Riverside Church
And told America its war was with poverty
Not Southeast Asia.

Have we evolved so far
Beyond those days when
Our public bathrooms were marked
To distinguish
Black from white?
How far have we come
As this “one nation under God”
Towards being one nation truly under God?
How distant are those times from us
When bias wiped dissent from the streets
With dogs and blasting fire hoses?

On the dawning of this new century
War drums sound again.
The eagle raises its giant wings
Stirred from its careful surveillance
Of  the wild fields alive and swarming
With its next meal
To search the expanded horizon
For something it only knows
It fears.

We were supposed to have learned the lesson
We were supposed to have understood
The meaning of the struggle.

Everyone has not been liberated from slavery,
Because everyone has not been liberated
From poverty.

People still live in refrigerator boxes
Damp with spilled wine, spilled dreams,
And cluttered with newspapers
Messages from a distant, mysterious world.
Heroes that fought at Ia Drang Valley
And Dien Bien Phu
Wander among the dumpsters
And haunt the parks
Of our great
And thriving cities.
Like empty wrappers
They tumble about the dry lawns
Thirsty for water
And hope.

Children learn how to squander life
As easily as a penny
Adults learn how to diminish dreams
That once held promise
But now dry up and brown
And blow away
Like fresh money sighs
Crushed in a weary hand.

And again
Like a dog will always chase
The reflection of a light
On floor or wall
We rush off to solve our problems
With the angry swipe of an erasure
On the chalk board of this century
Destroying all traces
Of our once great
And important plans.
King battled for the idea of “freedom”
And understood that it wasn’t
Just African Americans that
Had lost their liberty.
We all become bound
To our different masters
Destined to live out our servitude
Until we learn the true meaning
Of the miracle
Performed two hundred years ago
As this “experiment in democracy”
Found its life and its historical bearings
From the flow of ground ink
From the jittery quill of men
“Individual capitalists”
But capitalists that had a vision.

The water from the hoses That bashed the Freedom Marchers
Have rotted away, the dogs
That bit and snarled have long died.
The streets now
Move back and forth along
The trajectories of the day
In multicolored facets
The echoes of the screams
Of people smashed against the bricks
Of the walls of shops and food stores
Is just a faint murmur
In the ebb and flow of America.

Yet the insistence of tired,
Blurred and self centered vision
Persists.
We owe it to ourselves
And the future of our children
And this great nation
To resist this.
We are not lost so easily
To our own blindness.
Our hearts and our consciences
Are not so easily subdued
And restricted to the pursuit
Of lesser things.

Let us one day together
Stand again in the pews of
The Riverside Church’s
Dotted across this nation
United as a people
And as the sun pours like a sigh
Through the large windows
On a bright and shiny Sunday Morning
Let the ghost
Of Martin Luther
Shake the dust from the highest rafters,
With his proud and lilting voice.
Let the congregation join hands
And raise a joyous noise
To the ear of the Eternal Host on High
And once again
From the fiery core of the belly of this great nation
Let freedom truly ring.