8/3/2019 Lamont Palmer- 'April 1968: King Is Dead'-

1/5

8/3/2019 Lamont Palmer- 'April 1968: King Is Dead'-

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Dronacarya-text

April 1968: King Is DeadLamont Palmer

1.

News preempted news, upstaging clean air,

forced and stained among our loss and hope,while our faces? awash in speeches that cured.

Then the shot! Penetrating around the world.

Everything blackened, down to the clothes.Pride created the luminous black ties,

And black handkerchiefs, at the sad ready,(my classmates all had them, grievous wardrobe)

accessorizing that week against the chest

of boyhood and fear: shaky small skin.Someone (and something) was most certainly dead!

Night. Mothers voice, unlike I had ever heard,Dread and urgency, her new concoction,

From window to window, changed room to changed room.

'Where is your brother? He's supposed tobe in by 10pm.' Darkness, a curfew,

(my brother out in teen oblivion)

8/3/2019 Lamont Palmer- 'April 1968: King Is Dead'-

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from fresh caves - new and with a bemused shine.

Baltimore: never so much a fearsome scene;

to a boy, a world was growing, reaching towardfiery doors; the year of heroes and holes.

That boy put his head in his mother's apron:strings were like the ties that bound dead heroes.

3.Glimmer of damage, of the hurt, crystal-shaped,

but felt, coldly and against these faces,

settled on middleclass blocks. Pictures, dour,of those old blocks: what has died, lives

magnanimously, in wind, in tears, and chimes,lost chimes, lost sounds, noted by desolation.

We were not political, just a family(safe, we thought, on placid Annellen Road)

drenched in media's blood and perceptions,

splattered and spayed, transformed by the scene:

a decade of martyrs, falling like dark rain.

8/3/2019 Lamont Palmer- 'April 1968: King Is Dead'-

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8/3/2019 Lamont Palmer- 'April 1968: King Is Dead'-

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