Frederick Douglass Was Right
Mary K. O’Melveny
It is the demanders who are known in final reckonings.
Those who speak up sharply from silent places.
Rosa refused to give up her seat on the bus.
Malcolm X railed from Harlem’s street corners.
Those who speak up sharply from silent places
protest to save the rest of us from quiet desperations.
(Malcolm X railed from Harlem’s street corners;
Colin Kaepernick knelt down on playing fields.)
Protest to save the rest of us from quiet desperations
Martin Luther King wrote from Birmingham’s jail.
Colin Kaepernick knelt down on playing fields
while everyone debated the limits of dissent.
Martin Luther King wrote from Birmingham’s jail
before bullets pierced the heart of hope.
While everyone debated the limits of dissent,
some people thought they could sit back and wait.
Before bullets pierced the heart of hope,
calls to action were overshadowed by fear.
Some people thought they could sit back and wait.
Now we see that Frederick Douglass was right.
Calls to action were overshadowed by fear
when Rosa refused to give up her seat on the bus.
Now we see that Frederick Douglass was right.
It is the demanders who are known in final reckonings.
Mary K. O’Melveny recently retired as a labor rights attorney. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Woodstock, NY. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Allegro Poetry Magazine, GFT Press, The Flagler Review, The Write Place At The Write Time, The Offbeat, and Into the Void, and blog sites such as Writing in a Woman’s Voice and Women at Woodstock. Her poem Cease Fire won the 2017 Raynes Poetry Competition sponsored by Jewish Currents Magazine and appears in the anthology Borders and Boundaries (Blue Threads Press 2017). Her poem A Short Bibliography of Secrets was a finalist for The Poet Billow’s 2017 Pangaea Prize.