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April 4, 1968
Eyes bulging, angry and dry
Tears scalding the back of my throat,
Into my stomach they go churning,
And set my heart really burning.
This
just in. It is confirmed…
42nd Street in a riot.
Wall street in a panic.
Grown men crying, women cursing.
So it
is done. He is dead.
Down from the mountaintop
With a bullet in his head.
Sing a song of Don Quixote….
They’ll be sorry, just wait
Watch what comes, you’ll see
A hawk has killed the dove.
Vile, putrid vultures now circle.
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INTEGRATION
Junie
wasn't there that day
We played kickball and dodge ball
but Junie never played anyway.
Junie didn't like anyone, but me
I didn't know why, wondered how.
He never hit me, never scared me.
But Junie wasn't there that day
I had to fact alone the stares,
the sneers, how they made us alone
especially if Junie wasn't there
It was just me, and all of them
Guineas, Jews, micks, spics... and me.
I heard Junie's father one time yell,
'Git yo black ass home na-ow!'
And then Junie wasn't there, ever
Again I looked for Junie
Oh, Junebug, Junior, Whatever!!
But Junie wasn't there again.
From Alabama, Harlem, ports unknown,
among Lady Liberty's tired and poor,
Us. Immigrants, too, from a different boat.
Vinnie, Saul, Tommy and Hector
and I still came to school, but
Junie never came back.
So I learned to read and write,
play centerfield and swing a baseball bat,
anything to be a classmate, just another kid.
Alone. Alienated. Aloof.
A Harlem boy stranded in the Bronx
One of a kind in 1960.
Alienated, but integrated
and so would life go
after that day when Junie left. |
DARK ANGELS
Once
invisible, like silt on the bottom
trampled, spat upon, pissed on
and pissed off to be told it was rain
but knowing a place, even digging in
we now fall from grace, dark angels.
Dark angels we are no more the chaff
but now the wheat, a hearty staple
to make things 'do what they do'
as we said we would if we only could.
We could and did, can and must!
Now is the time to find and give relief
to a pressure cooker holding on
to a dream deferred.
A dream handed down from a mountaintop
A dream of content and character, and judgment, too.
Yes dark angels, yes you people, darker than blue
Once invisible your head is held high
as mine in this moment- for a moment
but a question looms large, its answer, great.
Are we now a target, or a beacon?
And does it take four years to know?
What will we do, dark angels? |
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Remembrance of HOME
I
heard a bottle shatter, erupting
Against an urban peace as fragile as its glass,
and now, as broken. A
voice,
'you dirty black bastid,' was heard to say,
being now tested against the loud,
profane, lye-covered, pissiness
of HOME.
A
bird, a gull, hopping on one foot,
and sporting frayed and sooty feathers,
snatched a crab from a crack
in the slum concrete,
and carried it HOME,
Somewhere in Harlem, 1954
orange popsicle juice trickled down
my BROOKLYN DODGERS -shirt,
onto my sun-scorched dungarees.
I was three and at HOME.
Doug Curry
manchilld99@netscape.net
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