Your body crossed the Alabama
yesterday one last time.
Led by two black horses
pulling your caisson over the bridge
with its despicable name—
the Edmund Pettus bridge—your life
a battle ‘gainst all his peak’d hat proclaimed.
The horses carried you this time;
on Bloody Sunday sixty years ago,
spurred by troopers,
they charged you,
maimed your body.
This day troopers ushered you in silence
over the bridge, hushed mourners praying
a benediction.
Your mind never faltered, stayed
its course—all about love, you said.
Your spirit sustained you
from sharecropper boy in Alabama
to lunch counters in Nashville
and Lincoln’s monument on the mall.
You led with your body, absorbed its pain.
In the end,
horses carried that body to glory.
(c) Phil Hefner. 7/26/2020
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