Poems
Counterclockwise stir coffee
Tea not at all
The moon and stars disjoint
Life the reconstructed south
I bend oak shafts
Weave reeds
Wallow in willow leaves
Life is a thicket
I sigh a lot
Coffee just a cheap trick
Learned from randy goats
With no tea leaf portent
Come for tea at 4
I drink a bit at 5
With any luck
I’ll be three sheets by 6
And won’t remember her
A student says to his teacher, “You talk about peace but you teach me fighting. How do you reconcile the two?”
The teacher answered, “It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a garden in a war.”
We are still fighting for Civil Rights.
America has ignored sexual harassment for years but, with the gates now open, it has become topic of conversation. The race side of sexual harassment has as punishment included every extreme from beating to burning, castration and lynching because of “accusations” of improper sexual advance. The media /press, however, continue to avoid conjoining sex and race. When race was/is involved, “accusations” were/are taken seriously and completely ignored otherwise. Emmett Till was brutally murdered, more than 60 years ago, because he allegedly whistled at a white woman. Simply looking at a white woman was cause for murder in America. The Emmett Till accusation we know now, from the accuser, was a lie. We find sex fiends around every corner and their secrets being kept, like in Emmett Till’s murder, long after the fact. How do we get justice? Americans won’t even talk about sex and race.
The reports of shameless conduct are staggering and we stand by talking about how much is too much. Companies that were and are aware of perpetrators hope to distance themselves by quickly firing white offenders without admitting that they knew all along and did nothing. African Americans men have died for less, much, much less. We look forward to the justice that must be afforded to women in America, but we also look forward to the dialog that condemns the atrocities that were committed by sex-mongers who falsely ascribed their behaviors to African Americans.
