Lift Every Voice

Milton Jordan

November 3, 2021

In thanksgiving for Rev. Dr. William Barber and those who joined the march for voting rights from Georgetown to Austin during the 2021 regular session of the Texas Legislature.

We had, some time back we thought, crossed that bridge,

enough skulls cracked, enough bodies bruised,

ample buses burned, sisters and brothers buried,

and rights hard-won soon to be secured.

We’d moved on to folk song summers,

voices and guitars, and an end to the war,

and we marched from door to door to register 

new voters now freed from Jim Crow.

Yesterday’s limitations though snuck back

disguised as necessary order

for protecting political processes 

from invasions of the newly franchised.

Now, 55 years on, new boots march forth

to cross old bridges, their songs of freedom

ringing to confront the children of Jim Crow:

Lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring.

Milton Jordan lives with the musician Anne Elton Jordan in Georgetown. His chapbook, The Amberman Poems, is out from Kallisto Gaia Press which also published the anthology. No Season for Silence: Texas Poets and Pandemic, edited by Jordan. Stephen F. Austin State University Press published his collection, What the Rivers Gather, in 2020.