July 2017
Martin Willitts Jr
mwillitts01@yahoo.com
I was 10 or 11 years old, and it was either 1960 or 1961, and my Mennonite father took me with him on a Freedom Rider Bus. I think I had just finished 5th grade, but time has confused all the dates and times and places. Being beaten by the Klan and police together has a lot to do with memory-uncertainty. My father asked me never to talk about this period, act like it never happened. I had written and published two poems so far about that period, but I was not interested in writing more. Then, Trump was elected, and all hell has broken loose. I think I am back in those terrible years.
 
I recently saw ICE yanking immigrants off the bus and arresting them. I live in a Sanctuary city. I was horrified. I tried to interfere. They questioned me and my driver’s ID card. They placed me in temporary custody, then released me. It was too late. The people were deported.
 
Do not tell me that this is not the Gestapo. Do not tell me that the people yelling and cursing at the immigrants are not ready become Brown shirts. Do not tell me to settle down. I am still missing some teeth from the beating I had as a child when we went to register Blacks in Alabama.
 
Ask me what we can do. I will tell you. It’s simple: speak out.

​
1960s Haiku
 

Black sack in a wind
twists and sways, twists, and sways, twists:
man hanging from rope.





Sign in Alabama, 1961
 

I turned on the drinking faucet
to see if the “Colored Only” sign was true
that the water was colored,
but it poured out
clear as any other water.
 
I was disappointed; I was hoping
it would be orange, or chartreuse.





Bus Ride Going South in Nineteen-Sixty


Not for one minute, did I doubt the outcome.
I had tried handling mules
and knew stubbornness
when it dug in deep
and refuses to do whatever you want it to do.
 
I had seen curs kicked so hard,
their tails go limp between their legs
or when you looked at them sideways.
I had witness them snap back, too.
 
I had seen the landscape moving away
through the unwashed bus windows,
crossing invisible state lines.
I have been to the state
where I simply did not care.
 
I have washed my hands of dust and travel,
ate at places where service is slow
and food is indigestible.
I have sat on toilets that did not flush
and the smell lingers on you
like sour cologne.
 
I have been on a bus when a tire blew,
shredding and fragmenting mileage
like rubber strings, the bus wobbling
like an afternoon drunk, edging
towards unsafety, being told,
this is better than we deserved.
 
I have seen the bland, blank faces
changing with drivers,
one almost asleep at the wheel,
the longer the distance,
the greater the risks.
 
And isn’t this like the times back then,
or even the imperfect times now:
careening and dislocated, the grumbling
and backbiting, the staring at each other
like the stranger is wrong;
whether it is segregation in the nineteen-sixty’s
or now with the return of ugliness?
© 2017 Martin Willitts Jr
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