Ruby’s March. Rockwell’s Reckoning.

Six years old, yet burdened

with a nation’s pungent breath,

she walked through hatred’s furnace

as if fear itself felt death.

Four marshals flanked her footsteps,

their badges cold as rocks

while stones of slur and vicious eyes

erupted from every block. 

.

Walls smeared poisonous graffiti 

racist curses, perfidious lies

the kind that stain a century

and never actually dies.

But she, this small bright ember,

strode steady, straight and clear,

“a little soldier,” she was called,

who never bowed to fear.

.

In her white dress, she walks

a quiet flame through white faced spite. 

Four shadows guard her, faceless, firm,

yet hers was the sharper light.

Rockwell, the artist, fixed her mid-stride,

where innocence meets rage,

a child cleaving rips and tears

in America’s dirty stage.

.

The wall behind her mutters

in slur, in smear, in stain.

A crushed red tomato blossoms

like a wound the nation feigns.

But she moves on, unflinching,

small shoes tap history’s drum,

a rhythm cut from courage

that no mob could overcome.

.

The marshals frame her silence,

but the portrait’s voice is hers:

a lesson brushed in starkness

for every heart that errs.

For hatred wrote its venom;

her stride rewrote the day.

And still that canvas asks us

what price we choose to pay.

.

They named it “desegregation,”

as if language could pretend

that what she faced was merely law

ignoring the human end

of reason, mercy, decency.

The whole cracked creed of clemency

where decency was not.

It barely touched the truth

for the sickness in which she was caught.

.

The Marshalls, all of them, marched elsewhere,

the same raw air to breathe;

while Ruby climbed the steps alone,

the crowds’ bile unsheathed. 

Inside, her teacher, stood waiting

Barbara Henry, calm, resolved

and for a year the class of two

was all the school involved.

.

Her mother called it forward,

a path all children earn;

her father feared the thunder,

and every fear returned.

They paid in doors slammed shut on them,

both work and bread denied;

a man showed a doll in a coffin,

threats hissed at her side.

.

Yet Ruby kept on walking

a rhythm in her stride,

she rattled every chamber

where cowardice could hide.

And years turned like pages

’til president Obama would stand

beneath the ‘Rockwell’ portrait

that indicted their land.

.

He told her, soft and solemn,

with gratitude made plain:

“If not for you,” he murmured,

“my feet would’ve missed this lane.”

And history felt a shiver

the kind that truth bestows –

for giants sometimes enter

in little children’s clothes.

.

So let her march forever

across the nation’s mind

a lamp against the poison,

a rebuke to humankind.

For where her courage lingered,

our better selves begin:

the child who broke the poisoned wall

and allowed the future in.