30/30: Golden Shovel #7

At first the trip to the Capitol

was an adventure. I had no image of rioters.

I was a patriot who traveled

to save my president from

vague enemies. My towns

were all-American, all white, where

life was the way my grandparents said it should be, no fear

of strangers, because no strangers. But the shoving, pushing of

strangers who looked like me turned my racial

images upside down. Can I change

my racial images so harmony prevails?

 

Capitol insurrectionists came from towns where some white people feared a growing number of people who didn’t look like them.

Here is how I am using Terrance Hayes’s Golden Shovel poem format, as proposed by the Sunday New York Times "At Home" section, for 30 Poems in 30 Days during National Poetry Month.

Take a newspaper headline that attracts you.

Use each word in the line as the end word for each line in your poem.

Keep the end words in order.

Describe the story that the headline is for.

The poem does not have to be about the same subject as the headline that creates the end words.