Tomorrow's Bread

by: JRB

Wed Jan 06, 2010 at 01:59:23 PM EST

Besides my mother's secret and uncanny sixth sense for ascertaining a person's weight, I don't tend to write about personal stuff here, or anywhere, really. But on the eve of a vote that may decide the issue of marriage equality for some time, I wanted to share this.

In 1968, my dad graduated from college and was promptly drafted into the United States Army. When he got out, he spent the better part of the 1970s going to grad school at night. His days were occupied by his job as a teacher in the New Jersey state prison system. He helped inmates learn to read better, get their GEDs and exposed them to new fields of study. One of those fields was literature.

This old job of my dad's led to a bookshelf in the basement of the house I grew up in being filled with a number of interesting volumes that I otherwise would have had little exposure to. All kinds of Afro-American autobiographies and prison poetry collections -- some with titles too provocative for my thirteen year-old mind to comprehend.

See, I had just graduated from reading all the Dickens and Jules Verne and Twain we had lying around, but had yet to move on to my next literary hero, Ray Bradbury. I had heard of this guy Langston Hughes in school, and his poetry collections were the most numerous among this odd bookshelf.

So I picked up one titled THE PANTHER AND THE LASH, but none of the pages I flipped to interested me. And then I pulled down a tall, slender green hardcover with an etching of a man on its face (which I later learned were done by E. McKnight Kauffer).

One of the first (perhaps the first) page I turned to was in the back. A poem called, "Democracy."

I thought of them today, on the eve of the marriage equality vote.

Democracy will not come
Today, this year
       Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right
As the other fellow has
       To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

       Freedom
       Is a strong seed
       Planted
       In a great need.
       I live here, too.
       I want freedom
       Just as you.