Today's poem is by Ellen June Wright

Malcolm X, I Lost Him Twice
        after Eve Arnold's 1962 photo

My favorite photo of X hung on the wall
        of my classroom across from the picture
                of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

the right arm and left arm of the civil rights movement
        hung high for the children to muse at
                if they tired of listening to me.

Then one day it was gone. Maybe someone loved
        Malcolm and his fedora more than I and took him
                or maybe someone feared what children

might see in him, and disappeared him like history.
        I miss Malcolm twice taken—gone
                more than twenty years. I think of the children

who never saw him watching over them as they learned
        how to navigate literature, how to navigate school
                how to navigate this future Malcolm feared for us.

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Copyright © 2023 Ellen June Wright All rights reserved
from Poetry South
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission