Donald grunt Trumpf! attended that church
in Queens, NYC pastored by Norman Vincent
Peale whose ‘52 book The Power of Positive
Thinking which my dad kept beside his chair

And, of course, that very positivist theology
was dom-prominent in the First Presbyterian
Church in Bay City, Michigan that we attended
almost every week on, of course, Center Street

A bastion of WASP ultimate proof of Calvin’s
successors so instant wealth test for the elect
in that almost all white commuter bedroom
enclave to Michigan’s industrial belt Saginaw,

Flint, Pontiac and then Detroit the very route
we took to visit all the parents and family that
my family had left behind to journey 100 miles
back in time to the East Detroit neighborhoods

They grew up in already back then black ghetto
of the time when the WWII Detroit had not one
but two huge “race riots” that occurred as black
migrants fleeing the “Jim Crow South” finally

In the massive labor shortages of the world war
started getting jobs on the great assembly lines
so still in the 1950’s I found myself with these kids
playing mumbly-peg on an old porch with a knife

Thunk! into the fraying sagging old porch planks
telling stories of their legendary white boys gang
called the Beany Boys who performed prodigious
anti-black attacks swinging two by fours and until

Shocked I understood finally so very finally bad
about those guys in those gangs back home back
in the South End of Bay City who wore their belt
buckles turned to one side not to mention them

Actually sometimes wearing chains for their belts
rattle, clink-klank out the belt loops to swirl in a big
circle in the air swish-swash buckling over the head
of any common sense for which we could only pray

Since we knew they were waiting for us to go outside
but still we had no choice but to go outside and we
had to go into the Sunday school to finally find out
that after all the real disciples did not write the text

Of their own gospels and then only then long after
the torturous death (and resurrection) of the WORD!

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.