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Reflections on the Journey to Racial Righteousness

At Kelly Ingram Park

The wash of water over marble  -- a balm, like sweet gum
leaves shivering in the country. A few scattered clumps of locals
picnic or play checkers    -- where once water cannons  --

Bronze sculptures placed at intervals on Freedom Walk
lead visitors past a jail cell with children’s figures behind bars,
through Bull Connor’s dogs, fangs bared and leaping –

while an ice cream truck’s insistent calliope reprises
a Scott Joplin rag, and a Pepsi-logoed banner proclaims
the 132nd Anniversary of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

Against the familiar brick façade, same lead-paned windows
and neon sign as in the grainy newsreels.  I agree to photograph
some girls on the stairs    -- where once the washroom –

I’m thinking how the un-oiled wheels of law just managed
to deliver a couple of 80-year old preachers, former Klansmen
in wheelchairs for their life sentences, of the composure

in Goodman’s mother’s voice, and who or what impulse to grief
brings me – whose grandmother lit candles in the dark fearing
the riots would spill our way in April of ’68, whose parents

dressed her as Aunt Jemima for Halloween in ‘59  – what
utterance can I tuck into some crevice of atonement ? Then
Vernon McCoy appears with a commentary in exchange

for bus fare, out, he says of Birmingham, where a Vietnam vet
can’t get decent benefits – imagine in wartime –  and how
he stood here in ’63 at age fifteen (friend of the Collins sisters)

and that what you need to understand is this circle of black
marble, broken in four equal columns is for the murdered
girls and the water flowing from the broken place is tears.


                                      copyright, Kathleen R. O’Toole
                          first published in New Millennium Writings, 2006






Small Comfort

“God will settle this on judgment day.”
Thomas Blanton, Jr, convicted May 2001

How will we settle such a score, heal a scar
still leaking toxins like those train cars
in an old tunnel under Baltimore?
Thirty-eight years, and still the pure

terror of that September day in Birmingham
returns in voices that flutter and land
like acid rain on my skin.  Penetrate and
alarm us.  Sarah, sister of Addie Mae, hand

us the mirror, the shards of glass you carried,
your lost eye.  You become us, become me
holding evidence of what was unleashed
in my name  and seeping still under harried

streets we tread. How to read the convicted
bomber’s face, his jaw set, depicted
for us – as us – ascribing  justice to his white
God ?   I  have seen this face of hate

under bowler hats in Ulster;  but my rage
to sentence him – even  multiplied by four –
won’t incinerate all complicity that courses
still in we.          Turn the page:

uncertain future,          rumblings of protest,
little comfort.   -- Sarah --   someone ought to be  ...   left
to see     with our one clear eye.       Still
we     possibly       shall.         (Will we?)


    copyright, Kathleen O’Toole, 2003
    first published in Passenger, April, 2008

Kathleen O'Toole has combined a thirty-year career in community organizing and advocacy with teaching and writing. She currently works as Sr. Associate for National Church Outreach at Bread for the World. Her poems have appeared in America, Beltway, Natural Bridge, Poetry, New Millennium Writings, The Notre Dame Review, and The Texas Review among others. Practice, a chapbook of her poems was published in 2005 by Finishing Line Press (www.finishinglinepress.com). You can contact Kathleen at kotakoma@starpower.net.