For blog #33 I’d like to celebrate the poetry of another of Wisconsin’s Poets Laureate, Margaret (Peggy) Rozga. Peggy was Poet Laureate of Wisconsin for 2019 and 2020. But Peggy was a hero of mine long before I knew that she was a poet, and long before I thought that I might be able to write poetry.
I moved to Milwaukee in 1969. In the years preceding that, there had been a long struggle for fair housing in this segregated city, which has been referred to as the ‘Selma of the North’.
Rozga’s first book of poetry, “200 Nights and one day”, (Benu Press, 2009) chronicles that struggle for fair housing, and specifically, the culminating series of protests, a period of 200 nights of protest which Peggy participated in as a young woman. The marches were led by Father James Groppi, the pastor of a predominantly African American parish, and the NAACP Youth Council.
Vel Phillips, the first African American and first woman to serve on the Milwaukee Common Council had repeatedly introduced a fair housing bill to the Council, and repeatedly she had been the sole supporting vote. It wasn’t until 1968, 12 years after Phillips had first been elected, after 200 consecutive nights of marches, three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and two weeks after the US government passed the Federal Fair Housing bill, that Milwaukee finally passed a local ordinance. That struggle, fresh in Milwaukee’s memory in 1969, became the first part of Milwaukee’s long history that I learned about, and is why I say that I knew of and respected who Peggy was long before I knew of her poetry. She is and has been a fighter for social justice.
Anyway, that’s a long lead in to two of Peggy’s poems that I will share with you here, with her permission.
The first is a poem from “200 Nights and one day”, which I mentioned above. But both of these poems also can be found in her latest collection, “Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems”, (Cornerstone Press, 2021).
Five Gestures for Freedom
Friday, September 1, 1967
Arms locked to step into street.
Arms over head, protection against billy clubs.
Hands to face cupped around mouth
doubled over, retching. Tear gas.
Elbows up, angled out, pulled into arrest.
Arms behind back, wrists caught in handcuffs.
Hello, Fear
You’ve become familiar. You remain
strange. I try to see how I can live with you. I live
with you.
You shadow me, but you are not my shadow.
You are negative space, no matter how
you try to be positive shape. If I seem
to address you as positive shape, it is only
as a way to confront you as shadow
and thus to shrink you down.
That may prove impossible. You are
not my invention. History shadows us
whether or not we admit it. Whether or not
we see it. The Constitutional 3/5ths of a person
compromise, the Dred Scott decision, separate and
unequal, gutting voting rights, failure to enforce fair housing.
I questioned God who seemed diffuse.
Those questions disappeared once Fear
showed up in the space of shrinking positives.
When I saw it, I called it out, and even now
in these very words, unfamiliar prayers to a familiar
and ineffable God rise to my throat.