How many a year has passed and gone
And many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a friend
And each one I’ve never seen again


Valery Milovic, Love: The Only Engine Of Survival, 2000

BLACK KID MURDERED BY WHITE MAN WAY DOWN SOUTH
(white man becomes Hispanic after the fact)
-- by Klipschutz

Trayvon Martin was minding his own business,
and I can’t imagine the company
that makes the candy he was eating
when he was shot appreciates the publicity either.

It all calls to mind “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,”
but as Lou Reed might respond, “those were different times.”
Some things never change, as some cynic said
for the first time millieniums ago.

Strange how the wheel turns: this time the killer
is named Zimmerman, which means exactly nothing
except to the kind of people who collect small coincidences
and spin elaborate theories out of air.

I sit here in San Francisco, white and straight and safe,
thinking ‘Someone should write a song about this,
but what good would that do anyway?’
For now, a killer sits in his own house, feeling misunderstood.

-March 23, 2012


March
-- by David Lehman:

Every so often my father comes over
for a visit he hangs his overcoat and hat
on my hat rack I brief him on recent
developments and serve us coffee
he is surprised that I like to cook
once when he made an omelette
he flipped it in the air much to my delight
and it landed on the floor yes that
was the summer of 1952, he remembered
the high breakers and how fearless
I was running into the ocean anyway
the important thing is to see you doing
so well he said and took his coat and hat
and left before I remembered he was dead

In memory of William R. Fox, July 12, 1944 - March 23, 2002