ANSWERING MARK ECKBLAD ON MY FACEBOOK PAGE

Rather than answer Mark Eckblad’s question about my poem yesterday, I thought best to answer it here in advance of a poem written just now to be posted following this letter. Mark, I followed up their rejection of my poem with questions that proved they are racist, and so I won’t be posting there again, nor on the other Racine site, that also rejected me (I believe there is a 3rdsite, and wonder if I should try them some time), although people who deal in nostalgia and sentimentality are unlikely to be a fitting audience for my work. I’m also going to look into antiracist sites, and I note that one of them emphasizes both Wisconsin and Kenosha as targets. Kenosha and Racine are interchangeable, and I have always believed that Wisconsin is the most racist of the northern states, but then, had I been born in Indiana, Iowas, Michigan, or Ohio, I may have said the same it of any of them. My regret over the Racine sites has to do with my wish to share my work with the small, very small number of people there capable of understanding and appreciating my work. In addition to my new book, just out, A Place In Time: A 20thCentury Memoir,I have in ms Long River Home, in which I capture the heart and soul of Racine, a true expansion over my earlier books, in which I was concerned primarily of my life there in which the city was the backdrop, and also my ongoing ms of poems,Returning, which includes, among other explorations, obituary poems to companions of old who are now dying off one by one. I made a point of posting most if not all of these on the Racine History site, for the benefit of their children and friends, although the response has been somewhere between nil and zero. I have also recently put together a chapbook size collection of my Island Park poems, which total 20 in number. Some day there will be a statue of me in Island Park, and if I had my way, there would be one as well of Jens Jensen, who designed the park — he at one bridge and me at the other. But first the blacks and other off-color races must be seen as one people abiding in peace and appreciation of one another, under the single banner of humanity — being God’s children one and all. Meanwhile, it would be good to understand and acknowledge that the blacks, together with the Jews have been the greatest creators in an for our culture, and had the blacks been free their contribution would be still greater than it has been, but the times they are a-changing, and the blacks are coming forward with even greater energy and beauty than before. For myself I could not have survived here if it hadn’t been for my idol, Muhammed Ali, the ideal, the perfect American.

ONCE IN GREECE

In days of great uncertainty

I traveled to Greece

and found my father there

on each street corner,

and knew at last who he was,

who didn’t fit himself inside America,

as I was trying to do, estranged in

advance of wanting to join,

in rituals not meant for me.

Then one summer day,

on a winding road from Pylos

to the sea, driving together with

a couple recently met from Europe,

to be suddenly halted by a shepherd

guiding his flock across the hard packed

dirt road we were traveling on, and like that

I knew without thinking, in wonder,

that there was God at last,

and this was His land.