Crowd at a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party meeting in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, July 1964, Herbert Randall Freedom Summer Photographs, USM
“Poetry is always dissident.”
—Octavio Paz
It was muted Miles when we
Woke Saturday mornings.
When we rose from slumber
to scents of sausage, potatoes,
bacon, eggs and coffee …
It was muted Miles when we
Woke to fragrances wafting
from Sunbeam waffle iron.
Maybe manicures and pedicures, post-
breakfast? Maybe, on his way to
Work, the barber would pick us up for
close-cropped hair and nourishing adult
ear worms?
Maybe I’d be pitching? Brother
Steve catching—or gobbling
up ground balls at second base?
My Mother could organize all that!
Then rip apron off, gavel meetings
to order. Pull together picket lines;
Run California assembly and senate
campaigns—Or, settle long, long-
simmering disputes. She came equipped.
No cape. No “S” on her chest. No
unusual way of getting around. She
was just Mom …
Crazy Mom. Invited me to attend
a meeting with her. My response:
“I don’t wanna go to your political meetings—
I just wanna play Little League Baseball!”
Her muted Miles reply… “Baby, everything’s
Political… How do you think your park got
there? How do you think your coach got hired?
Everything’s political, baby.”
© 2023. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.
Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; BAR's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC. You can Vote for his work at GoFundMe and PayPal.
In this week’s segment, we cover state repression and regime change efforts. While the corporate media parroted state narratives about a popular uprising in Iran, all evidence indicates that recent…
Mnar Adley is the founder and director of MintPress News, an independent media outlet. She joins us from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Donald Trump's ICE enforcement is used as domestic police…
Nina Farnia is an assistant professor at Albany Law School in New York. She is a legal historian, focusing on the role of modern imperialism in U.S. law and politics, and a member of the Anti-…
U.S. funding for a study on the timing of hepatitis B vaccine doses in infants in Guinea-Bissau violates accepted standards of medical ethics.
Donald Trump and other U.S. presidents are gangsters who will sometimes steal from their own crew. The Greenland heist is but the latest example, as the Denmark colonizers cry that they were robbed…
