IN MY HOME TOWN MARTIN LUTHER IS STILL KING

In my home town Martin Luther is still King
every spring when they hammer the theses of their students
to the solid doors of the university.
Yours was so thick that they had to order a special nail
from the last remaining blacksmith on the southern coast.
As they pounded it in I had a strange vision
they were hammering your head to the wall.

And the word bled through the meaning of the book.

While the town busied itself as usual serving hot cocoa
at the café across the street, eating cool ice cream in the sunshine
clobbering fish to death in the marketplace and studying
butterflies nailed to the dusty wall at school,
I walked under the tall straight beech trees, the short, stout
fragrant magnolias by that door full of holes and listened
to the hammering of that ancient grotesque ritual
honoring the old Jew-hater Luther who thought he could
change the world by penetrating the word with a nail.

And the world bled through the meaning of the word.