Wilda Morris

How You Live On

Was it more than instinct
that caused you to push
Ruby Sales to the ground

so the bullet intended for her
blasted your stomach,
your young white life

sacrificed for her younger
black one? Jonathan Daniels,
you’d be proud how she’s lived.

Mute for seven months
after your murder, she found
her own eloquent voice

through which you speak
to a new generation
walking the long road to justice.
 
 
 
Wilda Morris, the Workshop Chair for Poets & Patrons of Chicago, and a past president of the Illinois State Poetry Society, is widely published in print and on the Internet. She has been a co-facilitator of interracial dialogue in the Chicago area. She is the author of Stop the Violence: Educating Ourselves to Protect Our Youth (Judson Press, 2001). Wilda Morris’s Poetry Challenge provides a poetry contest for other poets each month.