Nobody
is hurt more
by segregation
than anybody whose
heart lacks:
Louis Armstrong,
Maya Angelou,
Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Willy Mays,
Sonny Rollins,
Toni Morrison,
Paul Robeson,
Duke Ellington,
Sister Rosetta Tharpe,
W.E.B.DuBois,
Rep.John Lewis, R.I.P.,
Aretha Franklin,
John Lee Hooker,
…
Dave Read
But for peonies or daffodils perhaps,
leave the stone etched with the name of your dead
alone to cast shadows over grass day after day –
And keep a little flag handy to wave at the parade,
or to poke in the eye of politicians who spill blood
as if they only were spending money.
Dave Read
April is graded in the northeast by her work
toward the detonation of forsythia, which
converts neighborhood street corners and
Highway interstices into explosions of
sunshine for two weeks, max – and while that
shrub returns to ordinary and ungainly, a good
April hands the baton to May, who gets all the glory!
Dave Read
The real one, the Mount Rushmore of the good American mind,
which does not trespass lands of the Sioux,
Beams bright with the likeness of good John Lewis,
the likes of whom America has no right to expect to see again,
Whom Americans fail to emulate at their peril.
Godspeed John Lewis, good rest is your’s; good trouble, our’s.
– Dave Read
From time to time
Father nature pipes in
With an update, or to ground
Us for the weekend, or longer,
To effect the weight of things.
Our resilience becomes crucial –
We find drive we forgot about
And split the day between
Awake and shaken to the core.
Dave Read
We don’t bid our dead Godspeed to the afterlife
the way we did, in churches, where weeping echoes
off walls or gets absorbed by pipe organ blasts,
while incense spirals from an acolyte’s censer,
and the minister intones his woeful sound.
After we lowered our dearly departed into the ground,
back at the church hall there would be baked ham,
casseroles, and pies, supplied by neighbors and aunts.
Today, in function rooms, where event planners
have laid out aromatherapy diffusers and flowers,
we get right on with the afterparty and mingle,
nibbling fruit, veggies, and tiramisu, while a playlist,
synced to a slideshow, loops in the background.
Dave Read
