Archive
11/28/08
A New Glow
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but — Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963
In this poem's epigraph Glows a small piece of a grand and noble speech, Delivered, by an oratorical genius, To a nation reeling from the bloody racial depredations Perpetrated, in the Jim Crow South, since "Reconstruction." These words, resounding off the lips of that black prophet, Touched all of us who, listening, intently, Were hoping, groping, to find any signs of enlightenment That might help us lift the yoke of our bigotry's complicity Off the shoulders of every disenfranchised soul. That wasn't three months after my graduation from Yale, My liberal emancipation From the repressive, privileged strictures of WASPish society I'd known, too painfully close to the bone, Growing up Jewish, in St. Louis and in New Haven. And though that Moses spoke to me, to us, so eloquently, None of us, black or white, who'd taken up his cause, Remotely believed we'd see the day (Not for hundreds of years, anyway, if ever), Let alone a season, a moment less than half a century away, When America would inaugurate a president Risen from the fire of that "I Have a Dream" speech, Who would shackle his mind, passion, spirit, To the proposition that freeing this nation, from its biases, Could put a new glow on our tarnished credo e pluribus unum.
11/28/08
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