Nothing Better to Do

I was eleven years old.
The product of
Arkansas cotton
Detroit steel
And a culture of indolence.

The television screen
Flickered with grey and silver
Images of blacks and whites
Struggling on a bridge
In Selma, Alabama.

More of a massacre
Than a struggle
As peaceful marchers were shown
Beaten senseless and bloody
Bodies broken
Cattle prodded and cut.

I asked dad what was happening.

This is the man to whom
I presented a Confederate flag
Twenty years later.
Dad was the grandson
Of a Confederate soldier
But he folded away the cloth
Saying it was an “Enemy Flag.”
But when I asked him
What was happening that day
Live, on the screen
He said
It doesn’t matter.
Just a buncha folks
Got nothing better to do.

Fifty years later
A buncha folks
Got nothing better to do
Are assembled on
The Edmund Pettus Bridge
In Selma, Alabama
To memorialize a people
That marched in peace
On Bloody Sunday
To determine their place
In a nation colored by the pallet
Of freedom
Sealed in the patina of their own blood.

Indeed.
May we all have nothing better to do.