Doug Roy, Yellow Bird, Cut Paper
Dorothy Bell, Birmingham AL, April 4, 1963
Turning her back into a forbidding wall
of ice is a waitress’s response
to your challenge to her and everyone else
at this whites only lunch counter,
to ask themselves the vexing question
inscribed in not only, for starters,
your choosing to come here to begin with,
but also, beyond that, given this by-design
treatment you are enduring, in your resolve
not to flinch, everything about you
expressing a determined belief
it will strike people, eventually, that some
if not all will not need to experience the world
In the the way they’ve always been told?
___________
Ben Sloan
Review by Massimiliano Nastri
This is a poem I would call snapping the fingers: one image one action one place, seen panoramically, not by an I, but addressed to a you, that is: the I knows more, knows it all perhaps, but has dissolved into every object. It’s voice over but not from a pulpit, because of both what he says and where he says it, “despite it all, or maybe / because of it.” I suppose one may call it dramatic unity. Moving from the image/story to the sound, I did read it aloud a few times: trade-mark pen-sil parkt abovanear – herback / awallofice turned towardsu (Editor’s note: this line was revised out before pub). Though I could not find internal echoes, the waves, the alternation between caesurae moves toward that revealing turn (despite/because), a morality one call basic liberalism of decency, politeness eroding racism, because that is what it is.