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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 Georgiathe 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.

© 2016 - 2023 by Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely

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