Segregation Days Scene in Teenage Texas
It must’ve been some special showat our town’s movie house Maybe a scary midnight thriller
We never saw Black kids our age Not in a group, none in our school
We on the main floor before the projection’s start hear a commotion in the balcony then stand and look up there to where a bold Black cat, a teen like us, is on his feet to jive around with vocal backup from his thoroughly hip compadres
Then shouted cheers from us down on the floor as though we’d joined a mutiny
We knew they were the coolest Jumped to share in that a touch —across the iron divide: some kind of longing acknowledged briefly by both tiers
“I’m a poet”
The first time I ever heard anyone say that, it was Carmi, calmly at the Plough and Stars when we’d just met. I was convinced, impressed someone would have sure knowledge of herself that way.
The next was Hilary, with dagger-look defiance in her voice to the US customs agent who’d been rude it seemed before he asked her occupation on our return from Nova Scotia. She was pissed, was not going to say housewife or anything like that, though nurturing our young kids was full-time lifework then, poetry seldom sneaking in. I braced myself (I’d seen that side before), just hoped he wouldn’t dream up red-tape trouble for us: Which he wisely didn’t do.
Robert Estes, whose roots are in Texas, has by now lived more than half his life in the Boston area, mostly and currently in Somerville. He got his PhD in Physics at UC Berkeley and had some interesting times using physics, notably on a couple of US-Italian Space Shuttle missions. Since then, 40-odd of his poems have appeared in literary journals, including Gargoyle, Cola Literary Review, The Moth, the museum of americana, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Sierra Nevada Review.