Sylvia's collage poem: Small Town Texas Protest -- with the photos!

Small Town Protest with Collage

These come, then, with their signs, too many to choose best from. 

They’re ready, already, after a long wait for a way to protest here on the town square with its fountain, its man on a horse.  There’s no public transit to the cities, not like when the old folk were young, could take off to where things happen, back when cars and gas were cheap if you didn’t want to take the bus.  Lots of jobs.  Cheap rent.  Education.

Are they Generation Z already?  Then we start over?  Or what? They’re it?  Last chance?

Pick any one you want to remember, then.  Let it be the writing on the cardboard wall of your mind.  A hopeful sign from one of these grand children:

HATRED IS A VIRUS TOO 
Black Lives Matter

*
He called Mama

*

No More KKKiller Cops

*

Back Justice
Love Mercy
Walk Humbly
Stay Pissed

*

NOBODY’S ILLEGAL
ON STOLEN LAND

*

JESUS DIDN’T DIE FOR US TO
HATE EACH OTHER

*

RISE UP

*

NO ROOM FOR RACISM

*
STAY BLACK AND REMAIN PROUD
*
My black family and friends
deserve to be as respected as I am.

*

I’m not black
but I see you.
I’m not black
but I hear you.
I’m not black
but |I will
Stand by you.

*

IF THEY OPEN FIRE
STAND BEHIND ME.

**

They stand politely in Sunday summer heat, among them tech-savvy savants who even so made these humbly lettered signs on pieces of cardboard, … nothing purchased, nothing slick --  No Sticks!  They stand modestly through all the malarkey of small town southern plantation culture [ersatz Christian] assembly void of anarchist urbanity, nothing boughten brought along but new black tee-shirts on young black men who pulled this together as best they could, having never done anything like this in their lives, so that something could be said to have been said, here, in their own place --  to come together with blessings of all appropriate, if need be; to appropriate, for once, in need indeed, their own home-town King’s X.

Sylvia Manning
Seguin, Texas
June 16, 2020
after June 7, 2020

This from nearest town, New Braunfels

The young men who pulled it together.