Many white Americans still struggle with the issue of racism in the 21st century.This started with the Confederate monuments. The Confederate monuments do not have the same meaning to black Americans. While white americans view these works as a part of history, a past that cannot be covered over or changed ; the symbols of confederate officers being celebrated as heroes in public places to black americans will always symbolize a stain on America's very ideals. It was these people who fought to keep black Americans in enslavement and without any hope of being considered as equals to the white race. It was a wise move for cities to remove these statues and public monuments as it did not speak well for the image of America to continue to honor people who fought to deny people their basic rights and freedoms.
Those white Americans who were opposed to the removal of confederate monuments and statues, showed that they were insensitive to the black community and even antagonistic toward it. It showed that they did not understand black americans and how they felt. It was a
sign of how out of touch white Americans were with the black community.
As psoriasis; old scoros is'
With vulgarity; of method-biz
Darkening all hearkening
Bloated out ego-cankering
Blood money his diocease!
Trailing steel cans
and rolling out their
long rags.
The morning is a frost
broken in clamorous relief.
Frayed holes in their eaten
gloves carry a crushed chore,
a rotted job bundled in skins
of wet plastics.
They emerge from a deep
hidden hour
riding the back jaws
of neglected mammoths.
A storm hammers
in the scrape of their tongues.
The dogs lunge
for their voices.
They remove what lingers too long
from our past.
Published Black Buzzard Press 1982
A friend of my friend,
also became a friend of my enemy
There is only one thing I need to know:
are you still my friend,
or are you now my foe?
Black
Wasteland
Blitzkrieg hills
Broken promises
Death!
cut out the rotten stairs
a dustheart of demolition,
old glass, pictures
and all the debris of a too long
life, a foeteal child locked
under torn wallpaper,
no pulse, no water, shadows
of a stained man gone
this is the rest,all uncored.