Future Memories of Trains: Poems of My Life

By Michael G. Lockett

A wonderful English teacher inspired a love of poetry in Mr. Lockett during his senior year in high school. Future Memories of Trains is a collection of poems written by Mr. Lockett during the intense and tumultuous process of racial integration in America. Being the speck of pepper in these elite bowls of sugar -- elite independent schools -- Mr. Locketts poetry explores the precarious nature of inter-racial relationships and the power of love in the midst of extraordinary American social change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481778695

Michael G. Lockett

MICHAEL G. LOCKETT has been a teacher of history and science in the most competitive independent schools in the New York City area for nearly forty years. He grew up in working-class Cleveland, Ohio. As a young African-American, he experienced the turmoil of the 1960s first hand as part of a group of black students who occupied Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall in 1968. After that experience he dedicated his life to understanding the nature and persistence of America’s tenacious adherence to racialism.

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© 2013 by Michael G. Lockett. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/13/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-7866-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-7869-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013913045

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Contents

Introduction

The Breakers

The Hollow And The Center

For I Am The Naked Ape

July 4, 1972

Six Pm To Four Am

Who Is This One

Capture The Moon

The Departure

To Drink Of The Wine

Sixth Floor Window In The Bronx

Time Prism

Love Songs

Night Air Of November

A Rainy Day In Salem

October In New York

Between Here And There

Journey To The Center Of All Things

Rambles On A Rope

The Cat

The Census Bureau

The Personals

Lyrics

Little Boat

Father’s Day Poem

North Country Snowman

The Skys Of My Mind

What Can I Do

The Ring

Runner

2 Me

Seniors

A Day In The Life

Urban Shakti:

4 Line Poems

Wryters Bloc (1996)

The Other Side

Call Your Mother

Space Girl

Dorothy

The Road Taken

Shakti

That Tune

Tied To The Mast

Future Memories Of Trains

Suburban Shakti

Epilogue

Endnotes

Dedicated to my goddaughter Bo Tan,

and to the daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts, grandmas…

to all the women in this changing world,

Rise!

INTRODUCTION

Once upon a time in a segregated America, two high school sweethearts, each from difficult home situations, made the decision to elope and secretly marry while in college. Less than two years later the marriage had fallen apart in a most chaotic manner. Both the young woman and the young man pulled themselves together, finished college, and separately went on to have highly successful careers as educators in a racialized America, in an America that fiercely resisted the concept of true integration and gender equality.

Though I cannot speak for the woman, the man never fully recovered from their dissolution.

The poems in this little book represent my attempt to understand and communicate across the great gender and racial schisms that separated, and still separate, post 1960s America. I do not consider myself a poet, but I treasure the poetic human being. On occasion, I have become one with the balance of that state of being.

I ask the reader to begin at the end, with the Shakti quartet of poems. In these poems I feel something special was captured. Then I ask the reader to go back to the beginning, and witness my struggle toward a kind of enlightenment. Not all of those attempts to communicate fully succeed. But each set of words is true to the emotions of loss, anger, pain, redemption or joy that shaped that moment. These experiences connect us all, if there is compassion, if there is love.

Michael G. Lockett

THE BREAKERS

Michael G. Lockett 7/71

(For Cheryl)

Ebbing and fading

The whims and dreams of mankind

Are too often washed away.

And of that dream I sing a song to no one;

A wasted dream, a fallen tree

That makes no sound.

Glory unto women,

Stoic pain, depth in soul…

Abuses, frustrations

Sensations, sensations

Say glory unto women.

Glory unto men,

Quietly questing, silently striving…

Ruses, irritations

Sensations, sensations

Say glory unto men.

Ocean and shore

In harmony as one.

Water shall touch land

Under the expanding heavens.

Water shall sooth the land

With rippling fingers, melancholy currents

With pulsing waves, rising tides

With storms of passion, clashing frictions

One with the other.

Yet it is said

Land does surround the water,

In perfect harmony, the one upon the other,

Holding water firm, gentle.

One could not be not exist and be separate with life

And be ripe for its own self

Without the grappling presence of the other.

Groan the breakers, in the open struggle.

Pushing, pounding, rising, falling, coming, going

For all too see, natural as the sun.

THE HOLLOW AND THE CENTER

Michael G. Lockett 11/71

It scares, it terrifies, that first step

Toward soul’s coupling pain.

Protect the Center!

For what is kept from a heart

That feels no pain?

The perpetual flow of the Hollow;

They protect the Center.

A shadow through the prism

Will no longer blind me;

As I attack, the Hollow will melt,

The Center shall crumble

And a new world can take seed.

The only promise is of life

And the passage of time.

A rose shall bloom from the strife

Of our consummate crime.

But empty words of those before

Haunt the image.

I scream, I groan

From the dead, like Lazarus,

The Center is reborn.

No… No… no no!

The Hollow reigns, the Center thrives.

FOR I AM THE NAKED APE

Michael G. Lockett 3/72

Black and hurting for a dream

Naked before my desires

Stripped before a love of life

Come to me in a night’s demand

Feel the self of me

Within the self of you

Hold me inside your life-bringing fold

As I bring you a future to hold

For now and years together

Woman, hold that ape

Coming large within your sound

Pulsing life, soothing eruptions inside you

Fears were left at the gate

Screams bring the so-soft kiss

In love as we create worlds.

Such dreams of Apes

Phallic frolic in the minds of the weak

Naked minds must first be one

Naked love never undone.

Rest now until it is time

Patience - a virtue of the mind

So I will