At the head of the town by the levee is a new monument
To a free country and to those who died fighting
In its last great war. Above, are the stars and stripes
And below a tablet designed for the names of the fallen.
It stands an empty white, the colorless all-color.
Troubled by that incompletion I asked its meaning
And learned the shame of the whiteness:—A cotton broker,
My father’s enemy and mine (his ranks are legion),
One who has served our paleness under the hood—
Sign of a cloaked malignance that grows among us,
Accusing by red or brown all uncloaked persons—
This man, I learned, with others of like vision,
Had denied the dead black names a place by the white ones;
Therefore the tablet is empty and shall remain so,
The government not permitting a partial monument.
There are times when one doubts the benefits of progress,
Yet serves it still, if only by revulsion
From this wrong. I have not much cared for war either,
And am seldom stirred by battle monuments;
But this featureless sign at the melting river
Moves more than wrath:—Old hater, you have done well.
The god of time is a god too of the whiteness.
You have raised a monument to your own vacancy,
And to all the hearts of the world emptiness,
Nameless names in the masked terror of your voids.
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