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Fourth World Poems

By Rudolph Lewis

 

 

A New Day Is Coming

        —for Sam Cornish 

 

Our souls keep looking back

wondering have we got over

air-raid drills, fear of the sky

the beast with trigger fingers

Strange Fruit as a dirty book

 

that haunts we. Hanging in

the summer air like clothes

Adam in his beauty keeps

the ladies weeping for Jesus

A mother walks slowly up

 

the stairs. Those who care

with a green eye live on the

other side of the street. Today

her soldier son was chipped

off in a beige Humvee by a

 

roadside bomb. Like good

ole days he had married a

yellow woman like his mama

before he died. We disappear

from the cities like Indians from

 

their tribal lands. They line up

for the buses or at train stations

like comic characters from a

Caldwell novel or like heroes

in Steinbeck. They take all of

 

we like a Scottsboro beginning

Maggie riding the cold winds

speaks a warning & a dedication

Police cars keep circling blocks

waiting for the city to break loose

 

Everybody knows dreams & rage

go together like prayers & tears

that won’t stop the war to come

These are bitter cold hungry days

In hotels our women make money

 

being sweet to white men. A preacher

said Sunday a new day is coming

 

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Responses

Thank you Rudy for this rich poem.  With your storehouse of knowledge, you always give me homework (which I enjoy). I've been reading a little the last hour about Sam Cornish. 

-- Jeannette

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posted 30 January 2006

 

 

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