This image is of Peggy (R), then a 19 year-old SNCC member, next to future civil rights icon, Dr. Dorothy Cotton (L), after a 1962 church burning in Georgia—the state that Peggy's great-great grandparents, William & Ellen Craft, famously escaped from slavery nearly 115 years earlier...
MY
WEEKLY
WORD
8.8.20
Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely
Dr. Dorothy Cotton
With all of the chaos being sown around us, sometimes we just have to regroup, to recenter, to pause...
AN UNEASY PAUSE
by Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely
Will the concrete
Miss our feet...will our feet
Miss us walking
Into the TV cameras that capture
Our anger
Our angst
That we put out there
Into the streets—
Carrying the signs of our frustration
Exposing the conscience of the nation.
Since we have been forever walking
Generations plodding through the mud and mire
Of our endless ire—
Ever since
Ever since
These dark shores claimed us
The endless fields maimed us
The Big House blamed us.
Is quiet a victory we so desire?
No more shouting
No more sirens
No more fires burning.
So our pleas can be wrapped in
Lawsuits
and
Judgements
Tied up in courts
Only to be handed down
as
Hand-me-down decisions.
Meanwhile our historical incisions still bleed
And our quiet means nothing
Only that we are momentarily
Exhausted.
© 2020 Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely. All rights reserved.