After the Mỹ Lai massacre
my father, World War II veteran
of belly guns and Berlin Airlift
and the afterthought in Korea,
turned away from Chet Huntly’s report
and muttered,
“How do you shave every morning, you shit?”
—not at Huntly
because Dad believed in a free press,
and free speech, dissent, and voting—
but at Calley, executioner
of women and children and old people.
Same question, different decade.
No point asking the SCROTUS
(So-Called Ruler of the United States).
We know he sees only
his own orange visage,
like the Wicked Queen,
as fairest in the land.
But you, voter, supposed patriot
and “good person,”
do you see the anguished face of
deported mothers, who were
working as hard as you are,
separated
from their citizen children
after 20 years,
or the woman denied brain surgery,
snatched from the hospital,
handcuffed and hogtied,
her nose bleeding from the pressure
of the growth in her head?
Do you see the fear of green card holders
who made the mistake
of visiting their elderly parents
while SCROTUS and his posse of bigots
were machinating?
Do you see the misery
of young people
forced to be someone they’re not
just to use the toilet?
Do you see hopelessness
in the faces of refugees
running for their lives
with only the clothes on their back
when we tell them
how frightened we are of them
and lock them out?
Do you see the despair
of your fellow citizens
facing the loss of affordable doctors
that kept them from losing
each other and everything else?
Do you see the grief
in the young student,
who must drop out
because college is too expensive
or because, despite her fine mind,
she never made it there from her
underfunded school to begin with?
Is the grayness of the world
without art or music or story or dance
there in your own face?
Or are you capable
of seeing only
yourself?
–February 24, 2017, Harlem, New York
