Microwave Popcorn

I think a lot of y’all have just been watching Dr. King get beat
    up and, ah

                      vacillating opportunists straining for a note of
    militancy     and ah   

Hold your great buildings on my tiny wing      or     in my tiny  
    palm      same thing different sling   

and then they shot him   and     uh               left him on the front
    lawn  of everyone’s    vulgar  delirium  
for          having been chosen       walking home that night
     that’ll show you like    candy     and   love  
god     openly          reverse   order         

A bird gets along beautifully in the air, but once she is on the
    ground that special equipment hampers her a great deal.   


         And               Thereby home never gets to be a jaded
             resting place.
 

Credit

Copyright © 2015 by Harmony Holiday. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 22, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets

About this Poem

“This poem addresses spectator culture, the so-called emancipated spectator, the baffled displacement that occurs when voyeurism is confused with freedom or empathy or comprehension, and the numbing auto-didacticism that in turn displaces interaction. Martin Luther King becomes Trayvon Martin with a vast black fastness, and the clipped wings of the imagination spread like scars.”
—Harmony Holiday