The Black Belt Blues Poem by Cheryl Lynn Moyer Peele

One day Rosa Parks was just too tired
of accepting that's how things are.
Martin Luther King had a prophetic vision
he wouldn't live to see the mountaintop.

Sweltering heat, poverty, racism and despair
still claim all the breathing space
between the catfish ponds and the cottonfields.

The blind, the crippled, the poor, and the elderly
bundle up in layers hugging their own warmth
to sleep at night, staring at falling stars
through their cracked and rusty sky.

Children nibble a moldy potato.

Abandoned cars, corpulent vultures
loveless dogs walking nowhere
claim these back rural dusty roads.
Raw sewage pours into the open grass.
The sun bakes it all hard and crusty.

You can clean motel rooms for a dollar each.
Walk four miles to wash a white woman's clothes.
Beg a ride to the grocery store.

Mothers sing their Baptist prayers.
For your children's sake you stay alive.

The young people have escaped
rewarded with real jobs, real pay, real benefits
In the cities and way up north.
Their mothers used a switch with loving hands
to help them find their blackbird wings.

But once they've tasted
respect, human dignity, a life worth living,
they can't go home again.
They can't sleep there.
There's no peace in their souls,
only fear, anger, defiance
and the god damned bloody tears.