by James Finn Garner
To quiet the crowd,
Willie Horton
Stands on a squad car.
The home town hero,
The schoolboy star from Northwestern High,
Tries to tell them to forget their rage
And go back home.
But one man
Can’t tell two hundred men
To shrug off the sins of ten thousand men,
As the fires of anger and humiliation spread to shops and homes and burns like a furnace,
A crucible that doesn’t purify but only destroys.
Even a man in the hometown uniform
Stitched with the old English “D”.