Alabama Summer

Weep for Alabama.

Sunday school bombs
& midnight hangings
bed-sheets flapping
yellow-stained
& hooded
in the star-lit nights
of Dixie summer

O Bama of Confederate
Stony graveyards

courts of Montgomery
jails of Selma
& slobbering
jaws of Birmingham’s
flashing-tooth hounds

Where was
your hospitality
when those
empty busses
burned on
the baking asphalt of
the past?

-Terry Young