Good Trouble

John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus Bridge
Screen grab from CNN video — ©CNN.

 
 
I was fifteen
in a small Alabama town
when I first heard your name
John Lewis   
then
Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Their clubs cracked your bones.
Their tear gas clogged your lungs. 
Their iron pipe almost ended your life. 
But you stood up. 
You walked on 
for fifty years plus more
modeling resilience.

When you died 
the earth slowed 
the sun dimmed
the air thinned. 
The world would never be the same. 
Full smile   baritone voice
departed. 

Yet we are not alone. 
You left us with your words

Walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, 
and let the spirit of peace and the power 
of everlasting love be your guide.

Thanks to Robin Jonathan Deutsch @rodeutsch for making this photo available freely on Unsplash.

This poem was previously published in Valiant Scribe, July 17 2021
and is the title poem of the chapbook Good Trouble.

Chella Courington…

…raised in the Appalachian South and now living in Southern California with another writer and two feline boys, is a writer/teacher whose poetry and fiction appear in numerous anthologies and journals including DMQ Review, The Los Angeles Review, and New World Writing. Her recent collections of poetry are Good Trouble, Origami Poems Project, and Hell Hath, Maverick Duck Press. Lynette’s War, a micro-chapbook, will be issued by Ghost City Press this month.

Other books by Chella Courington: Adele and Tom: The Portrait of a Marriage and In Their Own Way.

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