Carolyn Tillo, a public relations specialist, wrote poignantly about the high school she attended in Jacksonville, Florida, and the roots of racial division:
I learned about race in my high school cafeteria.
Whites sat on one side,
Blacks on the other.
It was a house Divided.
We were smart kids enrolled in advanced courses,
But we didn’t know how to eat together. …
Can we talk of progress when we still sit at separate tables?
Two readers used poems to make precisely opposite points about violent protests in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere. Angel Butts, a white woman married to a black man and the mother of “two beautiful brown babies,” said she hadn’t written a poem in 20 years. But she lives on Staten Island in New York, three blocks from where Eric Garner died shortly after he was put in a chokehold by a white police officer, and “this one poured out”:
As Ferguson burns,
I hear the outrage of a people with lives rendered valueless once and for all.
A people with hearts that can bleed onto the streets without recourse. And so, as Ferguson burns, I hear the voice inside me chant, “Burn on.”
Let the fires burn until every city, every town is on its knees.
Until there is no choice but for all of us to burn alone or rise again together.
In contrast, Mark Steensland, a white author, filmmaker and professor in California, wrote in distress at the turmoil. He grew up inspired that his father had marched for civil rights in Selma, Ala., but he is upset by what he sees today:
But you there
Breaking windows
Just remember:
You have no right to right
If you do wrong yourself
And revenge is not justice
Just wrong turned inside out.
This call for poetry was inspired in part because Susan Donnelly, a Massachusetts poet I’ve admired, sent me a powerful piece she wrote after Ferguson. It touched me:
What stays with me more than flames,
broken glass, crowds swarming the streets
after the non-indictment; the edge-of-screen
war correspondent clutching his mic,
reporting low-voiced to us outsiders,
are the tears running down
the young woman’s cheek,
that she keeps swiping, as she tries
to stay calm for the interview.
It’s like -
and she starts again:
They don’t realize we’re human.
Not the fire but the broken heart.
I’ll give the last word to a 10-year-old girl from London, Natalia Immordino, whose poem began:
The shade of a person is just the cover to their story,
And there is no reason not to open their book.
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