This poem comes from sudden realization that that generation of men had a great deal to overcome. Many succumbed to alcohol, depression, hard work, and poor opportunity and there seems to have been no respite. It has taken me a good many decades to come to an understanding of their lives.

Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor was the Police Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, for two decades. He terrorized white and black alike.

When I went to the movies, the Movietone News of the Day showed some Jews being liberated from the German concentration camps. Years afterwards, a German apologized for the horror.

All of these elements went into the making of the poem.

 

It should be recorded that my father accomplished

one amazing and significant act that made life better.

He rescued me and his wife from the hasty discipline

of Birmingham’s “Bull” Connor on the pretext of

having to go see his dying sister.

She on the other hand had written:

you can make $5.00 a day instead of $5.00 a week.

Wages are plentiful, more than the peace of mind

we all tried to appropriate after W. W. II ended

when a myriad of black soldiers freed those thin bodies

of incarcerated Jews from extermination camps

before turning their faces to the back of the buses,

 and those long discriminating lines of just waiting.

My father took his sister’s letter on faith and boarded

a train that evening for Ohio. He left mourning and

sorrow buried in those foreign graves where he thought

the body had a warmth, and all its worries, dissipated.

Little wonder he thought that so many black men

chose foreign soil instead of the misery of

segregated homes. My father and mother chose

to escape up South, as one of my poetic black colleagues

wrote. Here was the silence of another kind of invasion:

summer mosquitoes taking blood without so much as

a courteous warrant, or a how-do-you-do.