Naked and Alone
by Ron Olsen
When one’s only sin
Is driving while black
It demands of us all
A slight glancing back
Beyond Donald’s hair
The rhetoric
And flair
Is the past
Aghast
Smashed
Trashed
As though it never happened
Lessons forgotten
Lying there rotten
Rodney King
The L.A. Riots
The burning
The death
The fear
The push to move beyond where we were
To what we could be
A commission’s plea
A consent decree
A plan to get us there
Beyond the hair
The rhetoric and fear
The cloud of deceit
And self-interest
All of it washed away by time
As though it never happened
Leaving us here
Naked and alone
In our childlike simplicity
Doomed to repeat futility’s call
Refusing to see the future
In our past
Ron olsen is a Peabody and Emmy winning journalist and occasional poet who lives in Bel Air, Maryland. More of his work can be found at http://workingreporter.com/poetry.html and at workingreporter.com
