

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
9.12.20
Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely
Dr. Dorothy Cotton
This week's poem came to me as I watch the gut-wrenching struggle for the soul of our nation...
PRECIPICE.
by Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely
Now, at this hour
we peer with trepidation into uncertainty.
There is a growing disquiet.
Who among us will stand?
Who will retreat?
Who will push?
Who will pull us from this edge?
Who among us are the prophets, the truth-tellers
who will champion and assure our balance,
make certain our pathway upward, out of this mire
As we teeter aloft.
We have barely glimpsed his abominable territory
one that promises a dishonest and corrupted future
that has already made us shudder.
We long to shutter these four years of doors that led us here
to dwell among
the bellicose
the haters
the fear mongers.
YES. WE. CAN!
Close out the twittering choruses.
Make scarce les chapeaux rouges.
SI. SE. PUEDE!
We cannot allow ourselves to languish in dumb-struck horror,
or allow a national rigor mortis to set in
and permit defeat.
We must
Up-rise. Up-hold. Up-lift.
with ballot
with energy
with voices
with conviction
with inclusion
with urgency…
and give birth to a resurrection
of our national integrity
…as we reclaim the soul of America.
© 2020 Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely. All rights reserved.