What follows is what I would call a memory poem. It is about a memory from a long time ago. But it is something I have been thinking a lot about this last year and especially the last few weeks. I believe it is relevant to one stream of current events today.
When I was seventeen I had a summer job
With a maintenance crew
Which cared for the landscaping
Around townhouses, a small shopping mall,
An industrial park,
With some undeveloped areas in between,
There was mowing, planting and weeding
Digging and a smattering of odd jobs,
Sometimes I worked alone, but often
I was paired with someone else
And that is how I met
Tom from Texas
Which made me
Carl from Colorado
Most of the guys were okay
To work with,
It was really fun when I was working
With my best friend Dan
Who I had known since seventh grade,
But after a couple of weeks,
Dan was assigned to a riding mower
So I didn't see him much,
Tom and I, though, clicked right away –
Whatever our assigned task for the day was
We each just took to naturally complementing
The other's work
We became work friends,
Talking and laughing as we worked,
But still going along fast enough
To keep the boss happy,
We had a synergy
That made the work day go faster
What we talked about during those three months
I don't remember, except for one thing
Which I am coming to
I should let you know that Tom was black
And I am white,
But during that time
I really had no idea that skin color
Was supposed to make a difference
The school system I was in
Was basically white,
But there were a handful of black students
Which I had some interaction with
In shared classes and in school clubs,
There was Debbie A. –
Who was hot
And Mickey R. who was a year below me,
But I remember him as being funny
There were never any issues that I was aware of,
But perhaps I was in a self-absorbed teen age bubble,
This was a time before cell phones and computers
And social media –
Just having a color television set
Was a big deal,
I was oblivious
To the racial struggle out in the world
To me then
A guy was guy
A girl was a girl...
Anyway, Tom and I spent a lot of time together
From 8 to 4:30, many days out of each week's five,
I was enjoying our friendship,
So it kind of hurt, when one Friday,
Maybe three weeks before the summer job ended,
Tom told me it was his last day
That afternoon we worked together
In a remoter part of the maintenance territory
Doing something with some fencing,
We talked more seriously, but he didn't say
Why he was quitting,
Just that he had to go back to Texas,
And then he said something, I didn't understand
And let slide at the time:
“I didn't know they could be like you.”
About that time the maintenance truck
Came to pick us up and return us to the office,
We punched out, then shook hands,
We said goodbye,
I got on my bicycle, peddled towards home
And never saw Tom again
That one strange sentence bounced around
In my brain for awhile
Then school started and I forget all about it
Now fifty years later, those words have come back to me
Jogged by the horrible events now being recorded
For all to see
From Ferguson to Floyd
And all the black deaths
Between and after,
And I think I know now what Tom meant with
“...they could be like you.”
At seventeen, racism and white supremacy
Had surrounded and pushed and pounded
And coated Tom's life with an invisible notion
That separated him from the common shared humanity
That is the real reality
The white lie,
Which is all based upon an ancient robbery
Of enslavement
Of what cannot by truly owned
The human heart
The human mind
The human body
Perhaps in that summer,
Tom found an oasis
Where not every white person
Was some type of danger,
Perhaps he got to escape for a time
From the way his world was
With its threats and constrictions,
I hope that it was so when we were together
And perhaps, too, with everyone else
On our crew
I am so sad
So angry
So disappointed,
That in the long course
Of my lifetime,
It did not get better
For Tom, Eric, Michael, Tamir, Walter, Stephon, Breonna, George, Daunte
And all the lost
And all the injured
And all their kin -
Who are our kin as well.
Carl Scott Harker ©2021
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My latest book of poetry — poems written between late April to Late October, 2020, is now available and you can find it on Amazon here: Above Us Only Sky.
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