Our poet this week is Charles Coe. Charles is an activist with The Writers Union, an officer with the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection: "Picnic on the Moon" ( Leapfrog Press).

To have your work considered send it to:

Doug Holder, 25 School St., Somerville, Mass. 02143
or dougholder@post.harvard.edu

RIVERSIDE PARK

In the 1940s, on the North side of Indianapolis
was an amusement park where "colored" people
couldn’t go. There were no "whites only" signs;
the arrangement was simply understood.
It was left to the city’s Negro citizens to teach
their children how to live inside the dotted lines.
But one crisp Saturday morning in an act
of teen rebellion,
my mother and her girlfriends decided it wasn’t fair
that white kids were the only ones
who could ride a Ferris Wheel
And without telling their parents, they walked
across town to the park
But when they got to the gate
the white guard stared in astonished rage, and
shouted,
"Where you niggers think you goin’? You know
you cain’t come in here! Go on. Git!"
And then, as if these words were not enough,
he bent over to scrape up handfuls of gravel
to fling at them, like a farmer
shooing crows from a cornfield.
Terrified and humiliated, the girls turned to run
and left childhood lying in the driveway of Riverside Park.
I can see them, trudging back to the Westside
heads down, faces streaked with salt
and ringing in their ears
the voice of a man one might be tempted
to dismiss as merely a cartoon cop
policing carousels and cotton candy
but one who given the right opportunity
might have easily fit in
with certain distant colleagues
who at that very moment after a day’s work
herding their pale, emaciated charges
into the hungry ovens
sat calmly at family suppers
and in the morning would brush from their cars the
fine gray ash that drifted day and night
from the silent, lead-colored skies.