The air’s crackling
tonight at Bethel AME
We took a slice of eastern Massachusets and gathered here
resurrecting the Bible and beating it into swords
The rafters echo with shouting
We don’t care how the devils pare and polish their talons
Here hands are clapping
The pastor is shooting bolts of electricity from her lecturn
not respecting the eye of the needle but
respecting those who toil and those who spin
Public policy is hammered and forged tonight in the sanctuary
Hallelujah!
Take it into your soul!
Couldn’t they just hang a couple pictures beside
a plaque: “This is what all Alex Katz paintings look like”?
But no, the museum has to fill six rooms with his merchandise
— one of their blockbuster shows
Elsewhere
John Singleton Copley
John Singer Sargent
Dale Chihuly—
easy to overlook
Where you’ll find the crowds is shmooshed through the Impressionist
galleries, glorifying the savvy
of the rich Brahmins
who snapped up the genius of France
(two Rouen Cathedrals)
during the turn of the century
In a remote display cabinet
the pulse of modern civilization is delicately
poised in three pieces of Delftware
How the dollar stores and fast-food outlets hang on
under the shadows of luxury apartments that
have erupted over a decade
thanks to the momentum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
thanks to a tangled nexus of public transportation
A long facade along Mass. Avenue…noodle restaurants, etc.
Cheapo Records still proudly stands, now stocked with new media
In front, a convoy of buses and portals to the coveted subway
amid a melee of buses, a melee of cars, a melee of pedestrians,
a racing bicyclist causes a car to swerve
Come on in!
The drab office building
plaster and steel and glass
jostled by construction that never heals,
nearly hidden on a street choked with rapid walkers and pokey cars
We have it all—
whether in Kreyòl or Spanish or Arabic—
disbursements, much needed and much appreciated,
help for getting a driver’s license or a checking account
rides, summer camps for kids
Although the halls twist endlessly
and the rooms are filled with file cabinets—
The records of every immigrant filed (and often misfiled) by tedious hand—
The staff is shrinking
According to those who continue to work there, all are welcome
But not to those who raise and lower the locks on the canals of world travel
The new freedom riders are at
the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment
champions of the true and the just
The new freedom riders
are milling boisterously about the sidewalk
whereas Augustus Saint-Gaudens formed Shaw and his Black troops
marching undaunted to the South
invested totally in the cause for which they would all die
but would propel the North to victory
Meanwhile
the opponents of freedom
are meandering onto a sidewalk
dripping their sloppy mortar of fear onto
foundations of ignorance
on the other side of the street
and the other side of history
addressed by the governer
who used to be moderate before he deciding to
seek national office
Shaw’s foot soldiers have led us to victory this time
Soon gay marriage becomes law
not only in Massachusetts but
throughout the country and much of the world
Andy Oram
August 9, 2026