Mr. President

Bethesda Baptist Church chartered two buses.
We made our only father and son journey.
My mother’s caution did not caution him.
He grabbed my arm and off we went to see
a sea neither of us had ever seen.
Loudly, as always, he was asking questions:

“Are there more colored folks than white?”  “Yes, daddy.”
“Are black and white prayer birds flying with us?”
(That’s what he called the priests and nuns.)  “They are.”
“You say more than two football fields to the stage
and packed?”  “Yes, and a lot more behind us.”
He smiled.  “I told your mother, King knows Negroes.”

The heat kept wringing out its entrance fees.
Mahalia’s song built expectation’s hum.
The rabbi’s speech closed.  King began his sermon.
He built each word to verse, each verse to chapter
lifting the crowd to choir of memory,
the day transfixed in history, its echoes

spangling the ice-lined Mall five decades later, 
the summer’s sweat now frost in winter’s bite,
as masses form one congregation hearing
the gospel-steepened alto of Aretha
prepares us for the man who walks on votes
from dream into undreamed reality.

Bundled in willing layers I give witness.
A blind man slips on ice.  He’s near my age,
my father’s age, when I stood next to him
sharing the future’s call we would not share.
I think of how he’d smile when we first hear
a colored man called Mr. President.