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THE SET UP -- Uninformed and uninvolved with the real world (shallow might be a more accurate word) I really didn't know what was happening here when it happened. Of course later, it overwhelms me to think how privileged I have been getting to spend some private personal time with Dr. Martin Luther King. It happened way back then in 1963, during my Rock & Roll songwriter incarnation -- a period where the most important thing on earth was writing a song that would make it to the top ten on the Billboard / Cashbox pop music charts. I was courting Butch Williams, a young talented local soul singer who's father was stationed at Fort Ord and at the time was the 5th highest ranking African American officer in the Military.
-----One day, while over at the William's house talking "Show Biz" with Butch, the Colonel says: "Dr. King is coming to the Monterey Peninsula to speak next Friday. In the afternoon he will be addressing the students and faculty at MPC (a local Jr. College) but I would rather you and your wife come join my family and I and hear him at Bethel Baptist and then accompany us to a small private reception after the event. 30 years later I wrote this about that.

me in 1963: "Martin Luther King?
Oh, isn't he the guy they keep putting in jail
for disturbing the peace?"

from here somehow
by a route too circuitous to detail
I come around
in the close dusky atmosphere
of Bethel Baptist
abruptly aware of surroundings
minus the glare of light off white skin
feeling conspicuous...
unable to conform
I bob on the surface
of the dark moist murmuring warm

what the visiting preacher
said there that evening remains a blur
yet I vividly recall the shoe
being on the other foot
and exactly
where in that packed assembly hall
the two other white faces were

afterward at the reception
I observe the guest of honor
being shyly avoided
no one goes near him at all
he stands alone
looking tired and incredibly small

-AFTERWORD-- It is always fascinating for me to discover that when I sit down to write about something, in the end, the poem often wanders off and winds up being about something else. For some reason while writing When Giants Pass I recalled the time my Grandfather told me about the dark night in Illinois, when as a five year old he was taken to stand by the railroad tracks in the pouring rain while Abraham Lincoln's funeral train rumbled by. This triggering a memory of me telling my five year old granddaughter about my encounter with Martin Luther King. It follows that one day she will tell her grandchild about her grandfather and Dr. King. We are all personally and closely involved -- first hand -- with an infinitely longer span of time than we dare to imagine.