Poetry: Black Hands

I have no idea exactly when my father wrote the poem below; we think it was in the mid 1960s when he was teaching high school history and the focus was on the civil rights movement.

My mom remembered that he asked his class to come up with something creative, instead of doing the normal hum-drum essay. Apparently some of the kids in his class weren't sure what to do, so he tried to help them along by giving them an illustration.

She said it didn't take him long at all to write it, and I always figured I'd end up doing something with it, I just wasn't sure what.

This seems like a good time, and a good thing.

Black Hands
(Gregory A. Drummond, 1929 - 2007)

How can we know - 

Those of us who are white

How can we know 

What it must be like 

to have Black Hands?

How can we feel

The hate, the sneers, the spite 

That come each day 

To man and child alike 

Who have Black Hands

We sit snugly, smugly

Sure of our fate;

Sure that at the last in death

There will be no hate.

What can we know 

Of darkness ending light?

Will we then learn

In that eternal strike

God has Black Hands?