The Passion Of Johnny Robinson

Johnny and his friends bent steel with their hands,
sent rocks and bottles at cars full of white

revelers on the Sunday streets of Birmingham.
A black church had been bombed, four young lives

taken.  Johnny cussed and flung his reprimand
till the law came—a cop, a shotgun—and he lay

facedown, a door blown off its jamb in a storm. 
In the alley, dust, and a flow of desperation: 

a small stream had risen, had breached its banks,
as rain pressed the levee and waited to be given.

link to the NPR story about Johnny Robinson’s death that inspired this poem

Tags: alley, Birmingham, Civil Rights, dynamite, Friends, integration, prejudice, race, revelers, segregation, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church