Patterns

we’re entrenched in impressions driven in cast
at surface level and defined in theory
rather than nourished in being
Midway
I was born in the south in the year 1974,
six years after the death of Martin Luther King Jr.,
ten years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
twenty years after Brown vs. Board of Education
Growing up I remember witnessing the African-American marchers
through green-forested Forsyth County, Georgia
So many years, a hostile and dangerous place for them, from the
lynchings of 1912
Greeted with epithets in the town of Cumming,
a gathering of white supremacists
from throughout the north of Georgia
spewing stones and hatred
across blighted generations
The same place where the Olympic torch passed in 1984,
carried in flame by a man of color
The place where my father was a grocer
with patrons oft in the infancy
of their own rung of enlightenment
Just a few miles from where I grew up
in a town across the county line,
still with remnants of segregation,
in transition to the throes of suburbia
Internalizing my personal sense of justice
through these visions, or TV shows,
the encyclopedia,
or the Fulton County schools teaching on the era of civil rights,
76