A Poem on the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Trees are never felled… in summer… Not when the fruit…
is yet to be born… Never before the promise… is fulfilled…
Not when their cooling shade… has yet to comfort…
Yet there are those… unheeding of nature… indifferent to
ecology… ignorant of need… who… with ax and sharpened
saw… would… in boots… step forth damaging…
Not the tree… for it falls… But those who would… in
summer’s heat… or winter’s cold… contemplate… the
beauty…
— Nikki Giovanni
It was 48 years ago today that Robert F. Kennedy spent his last day on this troubled earth. I remember it well. I was 5 years old. Tears flowed at home. This great one, who had already lost his brother to the bullet, met the same awful fate on that terrible night in Los Angeles. Two months earlier he had delivered the news of MLK’s murder so eloquently…
In this election year of 2016, where we’ve seen violence on the campaign trail not equaled since the turbulent decade of the 1960s, we would do well to stop in our tracks and consider that all the hateful rhetoric– the racism, scapegoating, conspiracy theories and war-mongering– leads to no good end. If we think it can’t happen here, again, we are fooling ourselves.
Parallel Narratives 