I think a lot of y'all have just been watching Dr. King get beat up and, ah
vacillating opportunists straining for a note of militancy and ah

Hold your great buildings on my tiny wing or in my tiny palm same thing
different sling

and then they shot him and uh left him on the front lawn of
everyone's vulgar delirium
for having been chosen walking home that night that'll show you
like candy and love
god openly reverse order

A bird gets along beautifully in the air, but once she is on the ground that special
equipment hampers her
a great deal.


And Thereby home never gets to be a jaded resting place.


About this poem
"This poem was originally called 'Microwave Popcorn Ass Niggas,' and it still goes by that name from time to time, depending on the context. It addresses spectator culture, the so-called 'emancipated spectator,' the baffled displacement that occurs when voyeurism is confused with freedom or empathy or comprehension and the numbing auto-didacticism that in turn displaces interaction. Martin Luther King becomes Trayvon Martin with a vast black fastness, and the clipped wings of the imagination spread like scars."
-Harmony Holiday

About Harmony Holiday
Harmony Holiday is the author of "Negro League Baseball" (Fence Books, 2011) and "Hollywood Forever," forthcoming from Fence Books in 2016. She curates the Afrosonics archive of jazz poetics and audio culture and teaches at Otis College in Los Angeles.

***
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Harmony Holiday. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate