Elegy for Rosa


Rosa Parks, whose courageous act of civil disobedience in 1955 inspired the modern civil rights movement, died 24 October 2005 in Detroit, Michigan. She was 92.

You confessed, finally, it wasn’t aching feet
or tiredness in your bones that made you sit
there in front of the bus. You could have

trundled to a bench seat in the back, you had energy enough for that, the world soon learned. You told the driver no when he insisted you

offer your seat to the man whose pale skin
was his ticket, and your voice shook loose
a crust of disgrace from the centuries,

shuddering back through the timber of slave ships, rippling forward through the wombs of women, through the windows of classrooms and offices,

flickering in flames of restaurant stoves,
bubbling up through water fountains and
greening the trees of neighborhoods where

children’s laughter makes a new music.
How long did you sit before the cops arrived
to haul you out of your seat and off the bus?

When they did, into the vacuum whirled
the severed tongues of bigots, shackles
wet with blood, moans of mothers

whose children were stolen, the rage
of men whose wives were sold to rape.
Would that I had been on that bus,

a witness. My birth came a decade later,
after your work had begun to clear
the refuse away. Today, your death

reminds us we’ve more stones to roll
uphill, more seats to occupy and more
commands from fools to refuse.

—Chris Ransick © 2005

Colorado Book Award winner for
Never Summer
CAL Fiction Award for
A Return to Emptiness.
For more of Chris's works,
visit his website.

Once You Have Known Darkness

It's true, your shadow
will follow you,
but only to regions
where there is light.
You are forever linked
to these two worlds:
one that shapes you,
one that takes your shape.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
© 2005


Rosemerry's books include If You Listen, Insatiable,Charity, and The Christmas Candle Book. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Telluride Council for the Arts and Humanities. She is a member of Sparrows, Colorado's Performance Poetry Festival

Longing

Each time the trout leap
the pond surface shudders-
concentric circles of memory,
widening.
Eventually, they dwindle.
The pond stills.


The trout leap again,
their rainbowed bodies,
elastic, hurl
toward the sunlight,
mouths agape,
tails ecstatic with flutter.

What in us yearns for the world
beyond our world-
a place that feeds us,
a place our bodies will never inhabit.
The mind ripples out,
seeking edges that contain it.

We wade in cool green depths
of whys and what ifs.
Curious, we wander.
Wonder deepens over our heads.
Fluid and fickle,
the world wavers in its bed.

What was clear undulates,
fluctuates like filaments of green algae blooms.
And what is that,
skating the rim outside reach?
Hungry, we leap
and the world begins to shudder.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
© 2005