On the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1968
by Robert Bensen
Whoever we might have been,
whatever grief or fury we might have shared
were lost when the mighty arm
that God and the weight room gave him
brought down, I believe
a set of knuckles to open my skull
to the complicity of my complexion
and turn us, like the twilight, black and white.
A half-hour later: dizziness, nausea,
a swarm of psychedelic lights.
The brain trauma specialist
asked if I always sweat like this.
—Yes, I said, yes, yes,
I always sweat like this.
Police stacked the table with album after album of mug shots,
thumbnails of beautiful black males, growing older, somewhere, maybe.
Maybe my main mugger-man in there, or the brothers who shot up the neighborhood
night after night I lay sweating bullets on the floor, that summer the night
one of their grandmothers took a slug through her picture window into her heart.
None of those faces belonged above the arm
I can still see silhouetted against the cool dusk of April 4, 1968,
before it descended like the wrath of Jehovah
who smote the hard, hard hearts of the children
all the harder because they were his children.
—Officer, I said, I never saw the man’s face.
Cop thinks —This guy’s a waste.
But I had seen the heraldry of race, an arm raised,
and locked in the fist, a club, a mace—
trapped in this row after row, page after page
of sullen faces. Many frames, one rage.
I wonder: could he pick out of a college yearbook,
or a line-up of my entire despiséd race,
me, whose head got in the way of his fist?
Did this startled face serve in place of him
who cocked the hammer and aimed the rifle
and pulled the trigger that fired the bullet
that flew through Memphis
that lovely April afternoon, the bullet
that has been flying for half a century,
bullet flying still—
would this one do, who did nothing to stop it,
nothing whatever to stop it,
this one who’ll never undo the nothing he did
with the nothing he wouldn’t do, if he could.
First published in Piltdown Review.
Copyright © Robert Bensen. All rights reserved.
Robert Bensen is a poet, essayist, teacher, editor, and publisher in Upstate New York. Most recent among six collections of poetry are Before and Orenoque, Wetumka & Other Poems (Bright Hill Press). Poetry and literary essays have appeared in AGNI, Akwe:kon, Antioch Review, Berfrois, Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, Jamaica Journal, La presa, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. He has edited anthologies of Native American and Caribbean literature, and authored a bibliographic study, American Indian and Aboriginal Canadian Childhood Studies, at Oxford University Press online. His writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, the State of New York, Illinois Arts Council, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and others. From 1978 to 2017, he was Professor of English and Director of Writing at Hartwick College (Oneonta NY). He also taught at Parkland College and SUNY Oneonta, and conducted community workshops, including the Red Herring Workshop (Urbana IL) and the Seeing Things Poetry Workshop at Bright Hill Press and Literary Center (Treadwell NY). He is the founding editor of two literary presses, the Red Herring Press and Woodland Arts Editions. robertbensen.com
