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| National Guard troops and firefighters on the streets of Lamont Palmer's Baltimore during the riots following the King assassination |
Today is the 45th
anniversary of the assassination of the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis,
Tennessee as he prepared for another march in support of striking
garbage workers. The night before he had given his famous I
Have Been to the Mountain Top speech in which he seemed to foresee his
own murder.
Like so many traumatic
events in American History, Dr. King’s
death unleashed a torrent of poetry by amateurs and expert practitioner of the
art alike. Much of it was far more
earnest than memorable, more unfiltered cry of pain or cathartic release than
anything else. I know because I cruised
the net looking for it.
I was particularly
touched by one sub-genre—the assassination and the events that followed,
including the wide-spread eruption of urban rioting, through the wondering eyes of a child as recalled years later by
the adult. I found examples by white and Afro-American writers, but
the ones recalling the ghetto were
the most poignant.
Of these I was most
impressed by this one by Lamont Palmer. I don’t know much about him, just snatches to
biographical info here and there on the net.
Palmer was born and
raised in Maryland, where he still
resides. As a young man he performed as
a stand-up comic. He settled into a career as a mental health counselor.
Although he dabbled in
poetry as a teen, he abandoned his interest in it until he was in his late‘30’s
when he began a serious personal study of the art. He was influenced by the English masters, Wordsworth and Keats, the French Symbolist
Stephane Mallarme, and 20th Century
lyrical poet such as Wallace Stevens,
T.S. Eliot, James Merrill, W.H. Auden,
and John Ashbery. Not a bad set of teachers.
Twice nominated for the
Push Cart Prize in 2011, Palmer has
published poetry in online magazines including, Some Words, Ariga,
Red
River Review, and Strange Roads. In addition to
poetry, he also writes fiction and has completed a novel which is seeking a
publisher.
April
Of 68: Martin Luther King Is Dead
1.
News
preempted news, upstaging clean air,
forced
and stained among our loss and hope,
while
our faces? awash in speeches that cured.
Then
the shot! Penetrating around the world.
Everything
blackened, down to the clothes.
Pride
created the luminous black ties,
And
black handkerchiefs, at the sad ready,
(my
classmates all had them, grievous wardrobe)
accessorizing
that week against the chest
of
boyhood and fear: shaky small skin.
Someone
(and something) was most certainly dead!
Night.
Mother’s voice, unlike I had ever heard,
Dread
and urgency, her new concoction,
From
window to window, changed room to changed room.
‘Where
is your brother? He's supposed to
be
in by 10pm.’ Darkness, a curfew,
(my
brother, out, in teen oblivion)
jeeps,
soldiers, a city unlike its lit, wide self.
Heavy
blood, shed for life’s own heaviness:
the
father of us, alive in the caustic crowds,
drank
the podium pleasantries, food of leaders,
near
dead, but soon wholly dead on the whole of night,
and
warm laps where bleeding heads are held.
For
me, a church boy, the New Testament, my story,
it
was Judgment Day sweeping other days.
Looking
toward the sky; expecting wrath,
I’m
unprotected by deism, the doubter’s gem.
2.
Nothing
comes of guns but more guns. Smoke hurts:
smoke
of insolent fire, we knew what it was,
in
our dreams which lingered, long, like new jewels
from
fresh caves - new and with a bemused shine.
Baltimore:
never so much a fearsome scene;
to
a boy, a world was growing, reaching toward
fiery
doors; the year of heroes and holes.
That
boy put his head in his mother's apron:
strings
were like the ties that bound dead heroes.
3.
Glimmer
of damage, of the hurt, crystal-shaped,
but
felt, coldly and against these faces,
settled
on middleclass blocks. Pictures, dour,
of
those old blocks: what has died, lives
magnanimously,
in wind, in tears, and chimes,
lost
chimes, lost sounds, noted by desolation.
We
were not political, just a family
(safe,
we thought, on placid Annellen Road)
drenched
in media’s blood and perceptions,
splattered
and spayed, transformed by the scene:
a
decade of martyrs, falling like dark rain.
—Lamont Palmer
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