Another Juneteenth has passed without much acknowledgement of its awesome significance in our county’s history. It is the penultimate “good news, bad news” punchline. Its inclusion as our most recent national holiday stands in opposition to the perpetual murmurs from voices of the re-imagined Confederacy. My experience in October 2020 of unexpectedly being provided with a shoe that instantly ended 30 years of daily pain gives me a small glint of the joy mixed with confusion in the mind of each individual who was told on Juneteenth 1865, “your old life has ceased to be, you can now walk where you want, dance where you want, sing your songs, and get paid for what you do.”

As I write this, tears ring from my eyes, the lapping of the waves in Galveston Harbor mixes with all the water from the tears of the newly emancipated on the first Juneteenth. May its significance grow far beyond barbecues and a ribbon on a suit jacket without a tear. And mostly may it stand as a bulwark against the forces that want to return us to plantation times with no “juneteenth joy.”

This is my poem on the matter:

Juneteenth Opus

After contemplating freedom:
a teeter totter of rejection,
with a side order of emancipation,
the juke joint of harmony still awaits.

Intolerance cannot circumvent its own expiration date,
the extant of employment,
as defined in dollars and sense,
elusive forty acres gives no joy in mudville.

The surge to democracy resides in a sacred heart,
telescoping mercy to compound the interest,
of the mop and shoal of soup and soul,
where the travesty of stolen joy resides.

The empathy of all ancestral ghosts
lending us power to defend against our own demise.