Jennifer Cahill Poet Prose Poetry

A Torch

"Who are they, anyway..."? 

My father would say. I could have argued, 
 there are different, many theys:
they might shape you with the delusional screams of their hatred through their words, 
 the language of their body; 
they might mold a bi-ped shade of night colors.

Joyce Carol Oates entitled one of her novels "Them", written in 1969. 
A saga that begins in the 1930s.
That ends in 1969, with the infamous, historic riot in New York whose sparks lit a sense of injustice, righteousness in the participants/victims.

The novel's characters propel forward 
with their primitive need to survive, 
and they are white, poor. 

They have uncrontrollable, external forces poking, sometimes punching them, 
for their poverty. 
The violence of others cuts into the segments, the fragments of their lives.   

As if one or others are piecing together a jigsaw puzzle that is of a person and all his traits.

The violence of a man who abandons 
his family, instilling anger in the children.
They despise their father,
who helped their mother nurture them.

Their inner flames become ashes 
 that settle and cling, unable to be loosened 
 and shed. It is as if they are breathing chalk, 
 when they remember, a portrait of a family
 in a deep dark blend of acrylic tints.

The desperation in the wife, 
so she has to bend to the Earth 
to grapple..with her body.

Her son grows up, battling 
through scenes of injustices, his stoked, simmering rage erupting with the fires, 
 the burning of the 1969 riot. 

Their anger was tossed to torch their homes, 
reflected in the dusky sky, 
 the orange-red-gold blaze of the Sun 
a blood clot bursting over a Community 
that will bleed throughout the next several generations..
another Sunset, really...

"Who are they, anyway"?

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