Yarrow House

Test Pilot

            —for Ciam

Oh, my son, 
you were born on the great divide
between two Kings—Martin Luther

and Rodney—between 
hopes for citizenship
and crumbled aspirations.

Oh, our world.
The cancer of racial hatred eats
the bones of the country, rots
our every attempt at connection.

I took you on a journey with me
into the inner city, into the poverty-
driven, color-bounded lives. Then

I sent you out to find a new 
to live with skin color just a fact of life 
like a nose, like the hair on your head 
or the back of your hands, a pleasure even.

But what else I sent you into—
cultures meeting, values overlapping
or raging against each other, foundering
on class and style—I didn’t begin to guess.

And now your life unfolds
along a line tangential to my dreams
of racial unity. You forge

your own way, a man 
in your own time, piloting the coast
of an old land with a new map.
				

Published in Borderlands, Court Street Press, Seattle: 1999

Onetime reproduction for non-resale purposes permitted by the author with the following credit line:  by Judith Yarrow