It Is All Etched In Crayola Poem by Romella Kitchens

A Poem For Pete Seeger:
It Is All Etched In Crayolas, January 28,2015

It is the coldest day, it is always the coldest
when I read Pete Seeger has died.
Cars pass outside, and men who have stayed
out all night at the local bars pass paying life dues
down slippery hills of ice never knowing their real
names or identities. I imagine his fingers fine on his banjo.
Yes, there, he had this face, this clear identity.
Black child laying on warm carpet, crayolas and paper
when I first saw him on television singing about freedom
and social change just like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary and others...They were
all so beautiful then - these men and women of ideals.
So, I drew them on my paper, with joyously open mouths filled with song, blowing wind, amazing grace and changing times and a dragon who lived by the sea.
I felt their eyes were kinder, more like Odetta's eyes than those who did not like 'negroes'
so I etched them carefully.
And, Seeger grew each year...The body aging but not hope or the soul.
Now, the crayolas are long gone. The paper withered. But, the lustere of legacy is heavyweight, ephemeral and lasting.