Holding hands
is not an easy thing to do.
It’s nerve-racking for the timid,
and even more so for the different.

Bound by bias, not chains or color,
and constricted by a thousand-year-old opinion,
we preach progress and movement to those
who are concretely stuck—they’re awestruck by change.

We’re a congregation just as they’re a congregation,
led by a religious man and hoping for salvation.
We move in lines while marching in the street
and hold hands in a passion greater than simple love.

They have forgotten the foundations of the nation,
that we are built upon the idea that all men are equal.
But we have not forgotten “E pluribus unum”
and with linked hands stand united in a cause for all.

I’ve never been sprayed with a fireman’s hose like them,
and I haven’t been called “dyke” in a year.
Civil Rights are still moving in the new millennium
and have passed the point where I can hold hands without fear.