THAT COLORADO STILL MEANS COLORED STUNS
“White-complected individuals could not have their brown-skinned relatives with them at certain events.”
– Grace Jordan
(Rebels Remembered: The Civil Rights Movement in Colorado)
That Colorado still means colored stuns
when you consider how history and terror
(hot flaming crosses, night-burnt houses, guns)
serve as the perfect lens: a shard of mirror,
glass clear enough to form a holograph.
That we are members of each other thrills
philosophers and mystics and the half
of us who know how smoothly hatred kills
still makes for living death. Self-hatred takes
the cake. Do candles count? How many slices
– frosted, poisoned — till your stomach aches
enough to take a side, before hell ices
over? Denver and Colorado share
a history America conceals.
You care about the law enough to dare
domestic terrorists to take their deals
and crude threats elsewhere. You? You love your space.
The light around your body suits you fine.
You understand the way things work, how race
still rules, how nooses in the news incline
today towards humor on the late shows. Whoa!
Back up and ask: How did the KKK
control a state so mountainous and so
beautiful it broke hearts night and day?
Ask the Comanche, the Cheyenne, the Bannock,
the Jicarilla, the Arapaho, the Apache -
they’ll tell you how Spain’s Mexicans panicked.
They had to have it all: from Saguache
to every slope and peak and stream and river.
And when the gringos came – uh-uh, look out!
Their nerve was such that they called Indian Giver
the very tribes they robbed and then took out.
When Dr. Clarence F. Holmes, a dentist, felt
the pain from bites that plagued his sleep and yours,
he X-rayed first. He cleaned. And then he dealt
with what was cracked by drilling. At their cores
these rotting teeth were almost gone. Decay
had more than set in; it was quickly killing
its wayward host. Without delay
the doctor and his many friends were willing
to go out – white and black, Catholic and Jew,
foreign and native born – to places where
apartheid did not hide. The biggest you,
the crucial you, fights root-rot. You star.
The history of love boils down to this:
Destroy what you don’t understand or like
and every time you breathe or eat or kiss
your emptiness will hurt; your pain will spike.
That Colorado still means colored stuns
when you consider history and sheer terror
(hot flaming crosses, night-burnt houses, guns)
serves as the perfect lens: a shard of mirror,
glass clear enough to form a holograph.
Al Young
Copyright © 2008
