Sandy Fulton

'I can't breathe! '
Black men strangled for presumed inferiority by cops with power, manage one last anguished cry before dying of someone else's crime.

'I can't breathe! '
...

When I was a young esquire, O God,
as battle raged on every side of me,
I stood upon a hill of heads and limbs
and stared to see you grinning in the clouds,
...

New news of a new group
Always a new group, promising faster response,
more action than the old group,
pleading for a further subdivision
...

I was an old, tired tree:
married late,
childless a while,
always occupied, every moment busy.
...

I never want it to stop, nursing my newborn.
It is the most beautiful time
when my breasts engorge and tingle
and warmth spreads through my body,
...

Little naked child, my little love,
Running in the grass,
chasing the cat,
playing in the dappled sun.
...

i.
I wonder why your ships are painted green
While ours are gray? I've heard some sailors say
That swift ships, camouflaged, can move unseen
...

She had a piano teacher who'd fled
The Nazis, and school teachers who led
This redhead till they filled her head.
...

1960
The Sixties arrived at midnight.
We started at the Officers' Club
but the Big Band beat chased away
...

1961
Year of spacemen: Yuri Gagarin, Alan Shepherd.
The Russkis beat us again,
but all I really wanted was for someone with a poet's soul,
...

1962
Hawaii was easy to endure,
bronzed people under a sun never too hot.
As in Camelot, rain fell only during convenient hours.
...

1963
This was the year I first concerned myself
with a far-off land called Vietnam.
Even went there for four days temporary duty
...

1964
Folk Festival came to Newport like the circus!
The town's avenues swarmed with tourists;
penniless kids slept on beaches
...

1966
That winter the ancient coal furnace
beneath my Newport apartment
shuddered to death.
...

1967
The Navy sent me to New York City
to prowl the colleges
and recruit young naval officers.
...

1968
Eleven years in the Navy, nearly twelve.
The ideal life for me:
new jobs, new scenery,
...

1969
Sixty-four dollars,
that was all our May wedding and reception cost:
a hippie wedding, deliberate and in-your-face.
...

The universe is a mosaic, changing, evolving.
All we know comes out of
a barrel of tiles randomly assorted.
We dip deep into the tiles.
...

To Dunsford in Dartmoor.
A dirt road through empty wilderness,
a long drive from Exeter, and I am late.
Night descends rapidly
...

In Mid-Wales near the sea-path to Ireland
Cader Idris rises. The world's Lothlorien,
nothing could be more a dream of elves.
...