Time, Standing Still and Marching On (A Poem)

The Black Lives Matter march
in my hometown of Barnesville, Georgia,
on Saturday, June 6, 2020, began
at the courthouse, went through
downtown, crossed the railroad tracks
where Main Street becomes Mill Street,
turned left at the E. P. Roberts Community
Center (named for the long-time educator who
was the principal at Booker T. Washington
School before the long-awaited, way late, and
poorly executed desegregation of Lamar
County’s schools in 1970, when he became
principal of Forsyth Road School, which was,
physically speaking, the same school, but which
was in every other way much different than
Booker, and so was the first African American
principal I ever had), and ended at Myles-Wimberly
Park (named for two more prominent African
American educators: Robert Myles, my seventh
grade homeroom and math teacher in that first
year of desegregation, and thus my first African
American teacher, and Coach Oscar Wimberly,
for whom I wish to this day I’d kept playing, rather
than giving up on basketball to take an after-school
job, because even though I would have warmed the
bench, I would have learned so much about life from him).

We stood in the park for ninety minutes, steadily
warming up in the late spring Georgia heat and
humidity, listening to several excellent speakers
offer inspiring and challenging words.

To me, the most moving part of the ceremony
occurred at the beginning when event organizer
Krystal Banks (to whom much gratitude is due)
asked us to be silent for eight minutes, forty-
six seconds, the amount of time that police
officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee onto
George Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis on May 25.

It felt like a long time to stand there, being
quiet, listening to the birds' continual singing
and the neighborhood dogs’ occasional barking,
our breathing stifled just a little bit by the masks
we wore because of the ongoing COVID-19 threat.

Breathing was very, very slightly difficult in
those conditions, but it was nothing like trying
to breathe with someone’s knee on your neck,
making breathing more and more difficult
until it finally becomes impossible.

I thought about how the experience of time
passing is relative, depending on the extent to which
you are able to exercise your inalienable rights of
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I thought about how much things have changed
since 1970, and yet here we are, fifty years later,
marching to insist that Black Lives Matter.

I thought about how the Barnesville march
occurred on the anniversary of D-Day, when
American troops, along with British and Canadian
forces, landed at Normandy to drive racist
totalitarianism from Europe, and yet here we are,
seventy-six years later, having to drive it
from the United States of America.

I thought about how we’ve been singing
Mr. Dylan’s song “The Times They Are
a-Changin’” since 1962, and yet here we
are, fifty-eight years later, hoping,
praying, marching, voting, and working,
so that this time, they really will.