NOVEMBER 18, 1971
BENNETT BANNER
PAGE 5
.V.
Black Voices
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
ITiscover America
By ANN RANKIN
the ghetto
the Jews
George Wallace
Spiro who?
Richard Nixon
the Blacks
Jeanne Dixon
Ted Mack
Johnny Carson
the bomb
Greier Garson
King Kong
Brother Newten
Peter Max
Malcolm X
income tax
War involvement
wigs
heart transplant
pigs
Liberation
pills and diets
hi-jackings
prison riots
Movie ratings
academy awards
social security
landlords
Stock markets
apple pie
pigs feet
the F.B.I.
The end,
but not the end
of the beginning
of Discovering America.
AN EMPTY BOTTLE
By Freda Williamson
Like that beer bottle. I’m being drained.
So throw me out on the lawn for others.
But unlike an empty bottle I feel the pain,
Of being walked on until I find another.
You drank all my contents.
Now you want to leave me all alone.
And since I have dropped all my defense
There’s nothing I can do until you’re gone.
I’ll never bubble with the life I once had.
For like a beer that’s been open too long
I’ve gone flat and my presence is bad
Everything is valueless and wrong.
It pains me to know you’ve reached our end.
Because for me it wass to be a start
Of building something that would end
In our unity, so we’d never part.
But now I’ve laid all dreams aside
And am trying very hard to restore
My ssoul and my spirit that’s been rejectly denied
By a person that will love me no-more.
Busing
By FREDA WILLIAMS
Up before the sun,
Gone before it rises.
Jostling across town,
Hearts pounding,
Eyes darting about.
Fingers twittling,
Throats tense.
Ears cocked,
Feet frozen in position.
All tr'^ing to cut the tension.
Reaching the unloading zone,
Foi' rhetoric.
And discourse.
And hostility,
And only to return
Across town
After the sunset.
After it goes down.
Remember This!
By CELESTE LEVISY
Great is the power
of might and mind.
But only love
can make us kind.
And all we are
or hope to be
Is empty pride and vanity.
II
You can never answer an
unJTung phone.
You can never break
a broken bone.
And you can never lose
a man
Once he’s already done!
in
Death is evil, and life
Must be a constant ~
War against it.
We do not easily notice
that all features of the world
are together.
The individual is without
content in all senses
of the world.
He lives perpetually on hope.
On looking forward to tomorrow
having been taught this
way from birth.
God is the Self of the world,
but you can’t see, and for
the reason that without a
mirror you can’t see your
ownself.
It is love and war and money;
It is the fighting and the
tears, the work, and want.
Death and laughter of men and
women passing through me.
Carrier of your speech.
In the rain and the wet dripping
in the dawn and the shine
a copper wire.
IV
I am the people — the mob
the crowd, the mass.
So you know that all the great
work of the world is gone through me.
I am the workingman, the inventor,
the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
1 am the audience that witnesses history.
The Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am prarie,
that will stand for much plowing.
Terrible storms pass over me. I forget.
The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but death comes to
me and makes me work and give up
what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I grow, shake myself, and spatter
a few red drops for history to
Remember—Then—I forget.
When, I the people, learn to Remember,
When I, the people, use the lessons of
Yesterday and no longer forget who
robbed me last year, who played me for a fool
Then there wil be no Speaker in all the
World to say the name; “The people,”
with any flick of a sneer in his voice
Or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—The Crowd—The masses will arrive then.