Showing posts with label Martin Luther King. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King. Show all posts
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I wanted to share with you these 2 sensational poems by my dear associates and friends Mark Prime and Peter S. Quinn.

FYI, I'll post brand new portraits of Barack Obama in the coming days.

Good luck to the new US President!
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Finally

By Peter S. Quinn

Finally we are equal
That is the place to be
Finally we are equal
Yes finally we are free
There are dreams in our heart
From this moment to start
With so much to give
In rejoice and to live
Every walk in the past
Is now in for its trust
We were flowers and seed
That in past did bleed
But now is our hope
To hold on to that strong rope

Finally we are equal
That is the place to be
Finally we are equal
Yes finally we are free
There is so much to do
Bring it forward and through
With the feelings inside
That will be our guide
What we want to bring
And about much to sing
So we prosper to live
And from ourselves give
There were moments of strife
In our thoughts and life
But now the new shall arrive
Where all our hope will thrive

Finally we are equal
That is the place to be
Finally we are equal
Yes finally we are free
Give from everything like this
Don’t just make moment’s bliss
But the true reality to go
What we share and what we know
Let’s build responsibility
In its greatest durability
And the rise of new day to come
Where every prosper is from
There is hope in this all
Never let it again fall
Make the final takes a go
Come now start freedom show!

Finally we are equal
That is the place to be
Finally we are equal
Yes finally we are free

Ask not what the country
Can do for you
But be its strong support
That makes it all come through

Walking my way with my brother
In every its turn and trial
Where before my father and mother
Had some of the flourish denial
Where everything was in bramble
In every its thorn and din
Through struggling ways and ramble
For the growing to be akin
Where our ancestors are to lead
With their written words and tongues
So we might someday it read
And be their voice and lungs

Oh give the music its true worth
Of singing and the melody
So we might prosper this earth
And become of troubles free
Oh give us the music from birth
In each of its going harmony

In each our walk and waiting try
We consider the changing paces
Where the heart meets the sky
In every its way and graces

So much is to reconsider
And what we must for future aim
So we may come out fitter
In peace and be the same

The road is still to be made
To be someone to grow
And not to the moments fade
That falls in its furlough
There is safeness on the side
To give us something more
And there for each freedom abide
And reach to its peaceful shore

These times must be in safe
To bring us forward still
In every instances waif
To climb to the highest hill

Love everything in right
For that has given the day
And sketched for further light
To lead the tomorrow's way
When tracks of time be brought
Into the raised battlefield
Where love must come from thought
That generation appealed
Through every struggling grain

Each struggle is not plain
And driven through struggle
There is so much strain
In times of hope and juggle

Love is so much to give
And conquering from there
We must in justice live
For us in just adhere

The love is never easy
In times that move along
There might be some breezy
In hours timeless song
And fall be cast on light
On days from bright to dark
For sometimes there is night
Away in glowing spark

Today is sparkle time
Of glowing air
For now is the time made
To go finally there
In to the billow's high
And reach our new sky
With hope of every brim
From the deep of the dim
The growing of glowing
Of well-to-do times to come
With all the best forward
Each fragile bloom

Finally we are equal
That is the place to be
Finally we are equal
Yes finally we are free
There are dreams in our heart
From this moment to start
With so much to give
In rejoice and to live
Every walk in the past
Is now in for its trust
We were flowers and seed
That in past did bleed
But now is our hope
To hold on to that strong rope

Long last
Freedom has come!

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* * *

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This Day's Birth

By Mark Prime

Through flood… and quaking earth
And winds, those before our grand machinery
Anointed the solemn granite
With our foundation, left great trust in the future
Of their manuscript here
Upon the countries doorstep,
That such swaying of the pillars toward failure
Be remedied in the steadfast parchment.

On this day of days
Let us consider love,
Compassion, freedom, hope.
The sky, ocean, seas, soil,
Home to our limbs and joy
Long misplaced and low,
A glee sunken in our brow
Like the whisper of our end
Bending the corners of our mouths

Misplaced in the shadow of sand and war.
Let this day be remarkable with its coming,
Daring our better selves to stand upon
The shoulders of history and predict our future
With its smiling on the children of peace

In one long, joy filled stride.
We have but to embrace ourselves; the wish
We formed at this day’s birth
Beneath the sun, reaching down to us, above
The staining of men in trenches
Whose lives wait in favor of ours.
Holding for a rise from ashes,
To cleanse this; our foul-bred hunger.
Equipped with mercy

And kindness
The prayer need rise out of us, but no further
Than we might travel among the poor.

No further than the broken,
The weary, hunkered down, begging
Of our hands to fetch them up.

All of us, our strength, a sturdy column
Unbent by the weight of courage,
Tempests in the empty halls of power,
Rumbling a refrain of unity
As we break open the shackles of misuse
Long left to fester on the people’s steps,
Find that this dawn is upon our shoulders,
It is we, who now negotiate with our own death,
Our girth of indifference.

Rise now to greet this day,
Our moment elevated from spirit,
Breathing, throbbing, ready,
Not for one, not for country,
But for love.

Use it for more than our self-seeking,
Use it as if it were the breath of mercy kneeling down.
Indulge its hunger, it has been waiting so long,
Hunkered down, bound and bleeding, ready
For our rising shoulders to hoist it tall again.

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One Nation (Move On)
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© 2008 - Ben Heine
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The following piece is thepoetryman's MoveOn.org Barack Obama Video Contest entry.

If you like it please follow this link and vote. While you're at it, and while you're on the vote page, you will see the video html embed code and the link code, please place the link code on your site for your visitors and if they are inclined to vote for it they can do so via the page that follows and it will count extra toward thepoetryman's video's chances of winning.

The video is based on my potraits of Barack Obama and Martin Luther king.
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Vote now!
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The Dream Lives On:
40 Years After MLK

Martin Luther King - Barack Obama
Heir to a King?

.© 2008 - Ben Heine
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Martin Luther King "dream" lives on,
40 years after death

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By AFP

WASHINGTON -- On April 4 America marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, just as the first black candidate with a viable shot at the White House reinvigorates the late reverend's civil rights "dream."

In 1968 the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was killed by a single bullet to the head while on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis, in the southern state of Tennessee.

The Nobel peace prize winner was just 39 years old. Had he lived he would have turned 79 in January.

The mystery surrounding his assassination has swirled for years, with escaped convict James Earl Ray convicted of the murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Ray confessed to pulling the trigger, then quickly proclaimed his innocence. Debate over the official version of events, in which authorities determined that Ray had acted alone, remained sharp.

Conspiracy theories abound, with many refusing to believe how or why this unknown convict could have escaped from a Missouri state penitentiary, planned the assassination, and thwarted King's security detail all on his own.

In death King became a martyr in the civil rights struggle, but in life he was a charismatic hero battling for racial equality, from the 1956 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama and non-violent protest marches through to his famous "I have a dream" speech in Washington in 1963.

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,'" King told some 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in the US capital.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Four words -- "I have a dream" -- thundered through his speech and entered into the American lexicon as symbols of the pursuit of racial equality in America.

Some 40 years later, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign is putting that concept to the test.

The Illinois senator -- the only African American presently in the Senate -- addressed the sensitive race issue directly in a recent speech in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that drew parallels with King.

Obama's remarks were "the most important speech on the question of race and the future of this country since Dr King's 'I have a dream' speech," said Chaka Fattah, a black Congressman from Pennsylvania.

Several other commentators hailed Obama's address as historic.

According to a CBS News opinion poll, 69 percent of Americans approved of the Illinois senator's speech, in which he urged an end to the country's "racial stalemate."

Obama also spoke eloquently about black "anger" and white "resentment" at a time when divisive talk about race threatened to engulf the presidential campaign.

"I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle," Obama said.

"But I have asserted a firm conviction ... that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds," said Obama.

While 52 percent of Americans hailed King's "great influence" on civil rights -- with 75 percent of blacks and 47 percent of whites saying so -- some 39 percent of blacks said the country still had "a long way to go" towards racial equality, according to a survey of 1,012 respondents conducted by Ohio University.

Throughout the country, religious ceremonies and university conferences will celebrate King's legacy, including an event at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University, where longtime human rights advocate and black activist Angela Davis will address the theme "We are not now living the dream" of Martin Luther King.

(The report appeared on newsinfo.inquirer.net)



Forty years on, Obama, others
still stand in King's shadow

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By John Railey

By the spring of 1968, an exhausted Martin King was often tortured by thoughts that he would be killed. He harnessed his pain and pressed on.

“He grasped the benefit of dramatizing his fight with death - and hence, his people’s fight with social death as victims of oppression,” Michael Eric Dyson writes in his compelling new book, April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Death and How It Changed America.

“King never tired of telling black folk that unearned suffering, even death, is redemptive. … What we make of his death may determine what we make of his legacy and our future.”

Friday will mark the 40th anniversary of King’s assassination on that Memphis hotel balcony. The anniversary has always been a more realistic occasion than the King holiday in January. The holiday is about sweet dreams. The anniversary is about whether America really is moving from nightmares to those dreams. This year, in addition to the big 4-0 number, Barack Obama’s presidential run has given us all the more reason to ponder that question.

Obama, with his mix of black blood and white blood, has forced America into a debate on race. But it’s a debate that often gets dumbed down, just as King’s radical dreams of peace, equality and justice have been dumbed down. King’s hard legacy was quickly wrapped in soft myth.

“Before his body was even laid to rest, Martin Luther King Jr. had slipped into the long night of myth,” Dyson writes. “He quickly became the most overworked martyr since Abraham Lincoln.”

And “martyrdom also forced onto King’s dead body the face of a toothless tiger. … In exchange for collective guilt, whites have given King lesser victories: a national birthday, iconic ubiquity, and endless encomiums,” Dyson, who is black, writes.

“But blacks have not been innocent in the posthumous manipulations of King’s legacy. If whites have undercut King by praising him to death, blacks have hollowed his humanity through worship. … Whites want him clawless; blacks want him flawless.”

Amen.

Dyson writes about how Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, despite what Dyson depicts as strong efforts, have failed to fully carry out King’s dreams. You think? Dyson could have found a few other black leaders to explore. Regardless of what their inflated egos might lead them to believe, Jackson and Sharpton don’t speak for all black folks any more than James Dobson and Pat Robertson speak for all white folks.

Dyson writes that because “King and Jackson fought bitter battles with ugly forces, Obama can gracefully walk through doors kicked in by King and Jackson.” Jackson did fight those battles, at least in his days as one of King’s lieutenants. But Sharpton’s fighting, often just for the sake of publicity, has accomplished little except to further divide the races.

And how about all the anonymous blacks and whites who paved the way for Obama’s presidential run? Dyson does seem to get that point. “As he walks through those doors, Obama carries the legacy of his people even as he seeks to serve the entire nation. There could hardly be a more fitting tribute to King, and to the people and justice he loved.”

It’s a grand vision, anyway, that suggestion that Obama could sweep into the White House, buoyed in large part on the dreams of another charismatic black leader. For Obama to have made it as far as he has is a huge statement in and of itself about how far we’ve all come.

And regardless of whether we’re backing Obama, we can all hope that 40 years after King’s assassination, a black leader shouldn’t have to worry whether he’ll have all the time he needs to play out his hand, for better or worse. He shouldn’t have to worry that he’ll be killed for the color of his skin in a land that proclaims freedom for all.

(The article appeared on journalnow.com)

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