One day Rosa Parks was just too tired <br />of accepting that's how things are. <br />Martin Luther King had a prophetic vision <br />he wouldn't live to see the mountaintop. <br /> <br />Sweltering heat, poverty, racism and despair <br />still claim all the breathing space <br />between the catfish ponds and the cottonfields. <br /> <br />The blind, the crippled, the poor, and the elderly <br />bundle up in layers hugging their own warmth <br />to sleep at night, staring at falling stars <br />through their cracked and rusty sky. <br /> <br />Children nibble a moldy potato. <br /> <br />Abandoned cars, corpulent vultures <br />loveless dogs walking nowhere <br />claim these back rural dusty roads. <br />Raw sewage pours into the open grass. <br />The sun bakes it all hard and crusty. <br /> <br />You can clean motel rooms for a dollar each. <br />Walk four miles to wash a white woman's clothes. <br />Beg a ride to the grocery store. <br /> <br />Mothers sing their Baptist prayers. <br />For your children's sake you stay alive. <br /> <br />The young people have escaped <br />rewarded with real jobs, real pay, real benefits <br />In the cities and way up north. <br />Their mothers used a switch with loving hands <br />to help them find their blackbird wings. <br /> <br />But once they've tasted <br />respect, human dignity, a life worth living, <br />they can't go home again. <br />They can't sleep there. <br />There's no peace in their souls, <br />only fear, anger, defiance <br />and the god damned bloody tears.<br /><br />Cheryl Lynn Moyer Peele<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-black-belt-blues/
