“The Camel Comes to Us from the Barbarians”: This allegorical poem was inspired by an Aesop fable entitled “The First Appearance of the Camel”; it relates how man’s terror of this strange and powerful creature gradually turns to contempt once the means to control and domesticate the animal were discovered.
“There Came a Soul”: Ivan Albright (1897-1983) began his painting of Ida Rogers in 1929. Although the model was a twenty-year-old wife and mother, the Chicago artist decided to portray her as a lonely old woman. Art scholars cite Albright’s experience as a medical illustrator during World War I as a possible motive for his later preoccupation with old age.
“On the Bus with Rosa Parks”: In 1995, during a convention in Williamsburg, Virginia, as the conferees were boarding buses to be driven to another site, my daughter leaned over and whispered, “Hey, we’re on the bus with Rosa Parks!” Although the precipitating incident did not make it into a poem, the phrase haunted me—and so this meditation on history and the individual, image and essence was born. (By the way, Mrs. Parks took a seat in the front of the bus.)
“Claudette Colvin Goes to Work”: Before Rosa Parks’s historic refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, several other women had been arrested for violating that city’s public transportation segregation laws. On March 2 of the same year, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to yield her seat to white high school students. And on October 21, Mary Louise Smith was on her way home from a bad day when she was roused from daydreaming by an irate white passenger; she, too, did not vacate her seat voluntarily.