Alberta Clipper: 6/30/15: “Shifting Winds” by James C. Kilgore
June 30th, 1936, marks the publication date of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. Although today its reception is mixed—some still love it, while others find its controversial aspects more than troubling—it remains historically important, and if nothing else, it shows us the headway we’ve made as a society. “Shifting Winds” by James C. Kilgore appeared in the summer issue of Prairie Schooner in 1969, with the weather in Nebraska not surprisingly heating up. June saw highs of 99 degrees Fahrenheit. James C. Kilgore (1928-1988), a poet and essayist, worked in the English Department at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio where he was extremely active in founding new and diverse writing associations in and around the Cleveland metro area. He published several works throughout his life, and was named Ohio Poet of the Year in 1982. Kilgore’s poem acts as a reminder that our efforts to achieve overall equality and equity across diversity—while significant since the release of Mitchell’s classic novel—are still in progress. —Mariah Reicks
James C. Kilgore
Shifting Winds
In the morning I wrote in black ink a dozen poems
about ghetto children deprived of food and shoes
and a concerned city that sent one notebook
to six school children;
I wrote of black mothers fighting the ice of apathy
that rings my city’s slums;
I wrote of black men trapped in the hot, spiraling fire
of ancient hate;
I wrote twelve tragic stanzas of hope dying
slowly on the dark streets of my city’s slums.
In the evening I turned on the news:
I saw fires blazing black through ghetto streets
and no fireman’s sirens sang;
I saw shoppers leaving stores,
arms filled:
they trotted under glaring sun,
looked back from the shelter of low-brimmed hats,
and trotted on.
I saw a lawman kill a bare-footed black child
clutching a loaf of bread
and a pair of ten-dollar shoes
on the cold-noon streets of Newark:
I saw a black mother lose her eyes on Cleveland’s East Side,
And I saw her baby die
when a guardsman saw black
and squeezed
his silver trigger.
In the nation’s capital,
there were snow flurries
and shifting winds.
Prairie Schooner, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Spring 1969)
The Alberta Clipper is a biweekly gust of history—brushing the dust off of a poem from our archives and situating it in the current events and local Nebraskan weather reports of days gone by. Explore the Alberta Clipper archives here.