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Fugitives

I arrive late, as usual, paper ends flapping from my briefcase, crumbs clinging to my coat after a crackers-and-cheese lunch between stoplights. Picking my way across the muddy yard from my parking place in a tow-away zone, I glance at the glassed-in central staircase of the high school to check the time.

Selected Poems

Yanceyville

Yanceyville is a quiet town of 1,300. The tobacco barns give out just before the new high school and junior high; from the schools you can see the courthouse at the center of town.

Crimes To Fit The Individual: South African Justice

The destruction of the liberal, moderate left, both black and white, has brought apartheid to its logical conclusion, the polarization of the races. Each color is increasingly influenced by the voice of extremism. South Africa is now poised on the brink of guerilla war.

Selected Poems

Silver Water Tower

Afrikaner

Following through on an attempt to understand white South Africa’s control and manipulation of the Black/Colored/Asian majority is a journey that invokes a logical progression of disbelief sliding to horror, then, finally, a half step beyond to revulsion.

For Freedom

Write what matters, as well as possible, risking triteness, risking being labeled political, risking being under or overfunded, risking being imprisoned. The only weapon anyone really has against you is death. And that weapon, too, the older poets used to say, can be turned against an enemy.

South Africa’s Dark Heart

South Africa first entered into the American national consciousness this past summer when the sprawling, million person ghetto of Soweto rose up in protests that the police and army quickly turned into bloody riot.

Carrboro: Reflections Of A Small Town

So here I stay, along with the others who shamefacedly admit that yes, they too graduated from the university years ago and no, they cannot think of a better Southern spot in which to live and perhaps grow old.