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For Robert Kennedy’s 80th Birthday Celebration
A BUZZFLASH GUEST
CONTRIBUTION
by Norman MacAfee
On November 16, 2005, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights held a reception in the Mansfield Room of the U.S. Capitol to celebrate what would have been the 80th birthday of Robert Kennedy (1925-1968).
People influenced by him spoke, including Senators Edward Kennedy, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, John Lewis, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Dolores Huerta, Jeff Greenfield, and others. The event was videotaped by C-Span. See the RFK Memorial website at http://www.rfkmemorial.org/rfk80th/
For Robert Kennedy's 80th Birthday Celebration
(read at the Mansfield Room of the U.S. Capitol, November 16, 2005)
by Norman MacAfee
I write this in Bush's America
of torturing, Bush lying us to
war, Bush laughing at
the gap between the rich
and poor increasing.
No one knows what you
would be like today.
I am not a mathematician
so have no equations
to bring you to 80
and tell us what you
and the world would be
like had you lived.
Thanksgiving 1967:
I came to New York
alone to live my life,
with you as my senator,
and I hoped my president.
June 1968: I had no TV,
was writing poetry about
Vietnam, went to bed for
a restless night, dreaming of
anguished voices in subway tunnels
beneath Astro Place and woke to
a beautiful morning and
moaning in the streets and shops.
You were dying. The line was a mile
long for your Saint Pat's requiem.
Alone in an East Village room
that fall I wrote the words
"nostalgia for the future,"
not quite realizing
they were for you.
Your words and thoughts that year
kept you alive these years.
You became the president
of the other America
that we have carried around
these thirty-seven years. You became
the president of this other America
that we salute today, where
everyone has a job and some hope,
where there is but one class,
where we honor the arts of
"mercy, pity, peace and love."
Peace to you, "warring soul
with your delicate anger."
Peace to our bloody world!
Copyright © 2005 by Norman MacAfee
BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Poet Norman MacAfee is also the editor of
The Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now, a BuzzFlash Premium.
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