Fred Hampton’s Grave by Dorothy Mack

I live in East Black Shore.
Three weeks ago I gave a kid a quarter to bring me the Panther paper but
never got it.
Two Panthers displaced selling geraniums on the Neighborhood meeting agenda.
Five blocks away pigs broke and entered without warrant, threw foetus
and mother in jail without charge,
bashed in heads of friends on TV last August,
busted into Co-op School and handcuffed eleven-year-olds for reading Eldridge Cleaver.
The wife of a Chicago Seven teaches my kids music, revolutionary songs about Cuba.
Bobby Seale is bound and gagged as his own lawyer.
Chicago is Mayor Daley's town.

After Quaker Meeting, which was full of testimony about:
involvement
committment
love
I drove over to the flat where Fred Hampton bled.

Ordinary tree-lined street,
walk-ups staring like newly-painted faces;
no broken glass
no bashed-in doors,
only the crowd lining the steps back into the street to point:
here he was laid.
I join the hushed line, hatted just from Ebenezer Baptist Church, still stiff
from sermons,
read the handouts on Operation Breadbasket's breakfast programs,
and wait.

All there is to see:
one bullet hole through the front door sash didn't
even shatter the pane
in this most ordinary walk-up shrine.

only incense our cold breath's smoke
only prayer a limb-cold trembling
only obeissance our waiting-weariness

turning Sunday curiosity into dis-belief.