Broad Ripple Random Ripplings

Brought to you by:

Everything Broad Ripple Home

Random Ripplings Home

2007 02 23

Column

Converted from paper version of the Broad Ripple Gazette (v04n04)

Poetic Thoughts - Hope - by C.W. Pruitt II

posted: Feb. 23, 2007

Hope

I have been watching the re-release of the PBS series "Eyes On The Prize". The one on Mississippi featured Fannie Lou Hamer. She is one of my favorite civil rights activists; she was the wife of a sharecropper. She did some speaking and a whole lotta singing.

When Fannie Lou was with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964, she was approached by someone in Atlantic City who said, "Fannie Lu, all that stuff that you people are doing in Mississippi is just a drop in the ocean." Fannie Lou said, "Yes, but the ocean needs our drop."

These two poems are for Fannie Lou Hamer:

like a grainy

civil rights film

from 1963 -

a blur of hope

C.W. Pruitt II

October 16, 2006

hope is sometimes

difficult to ascertain -

evanescent to the point

that its presence

becomes almost completely

doubted to exist

at all

by the believers.

Then

in the dark recesses

of the human heart

a molecule of light emerges

which quickly explodes

in a nuclear-like reaction -

all directions testify

to the power of the light -

oppression, indeed

is the festering ground

for, hope,

which springs eternal

C.W. Pruitt II

October 16, 2006

cw@broadripplegazette.com

Brought to you by:

Brought to you by: