I don’t know what color to wear
For the child of rape forced to accept
Her mother’s rapist as Father
For that mother forced to put her daughter
Into the hands of her rapist
For the grieving mother mourning a miscarried child
And under investigation for possible homicide
For the child of incest
Life-long symbol of a family’s shame
For the doctor who must make a judgment call
On a woman’s life or a doomed fetus and
Facing 99 years if a court disagrees
No, I don’t know the right color to wear
Black of grief?
Rage red?
What color is fear?
Perhaps Gold for resolve that
These horrors must not come to pass
Robert Wertzler, Excerpt from ‘The Color of Our Rights,’ Darker Objects
“I often respond to a poem with a poem (Often enough to have resulted in a book of them.). Christine’s invitation to contribute to a collaboration felt as a natural next step. It is a joy to be included in such creative and insightful company.”
–Robert Wertzler
Bob Wertzler is retired from nearly twenty years in the mental health field both in California and Arizona. There are times the title, “Recovering Therapist,” seems to fit. In 2006 Bob retired (again) to move to western North Carolina to help and become the primary caregiver for his father who had developed Dementia. Before all that, there was much work at various times as a soldier (US Army 196770), community organizer, cab driver, welfare case worker, wooden toy maker, carpenter, warehouse worker, among other things. He relates to a line in a Grateful Dead song, “What a long, strange trip it’s been” But there is a life beyond work and keeping fed, clothed, and sheltered, and for him that has been much involved with reading, writing, and listening. He learned to read and love books from his father reading to him at bedtime and gradually transitioning to Bob doing the reading. It was not generally those things called “children’s books” that he remembers most, although there must have been some. Instead, his sharpest memories are of the works of Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson (what six-year- old boy wouldn’t want to meet a real pirate like Long John Silver?), Robert Heinlein, Louis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway (age seven, devouring The Old Man And The Sea), and many others. Nothing school presented could hold a candle to those storytellers. Bob credits whatever skill he has as a writer to those experiences and those examples absorbed as if by osmosis. One more favorite, this, from Bob Dylan: “he not busy being born is busy dying.” His recently published poetry collection, The Comment Poems is available at Lulu in paperback and eBook formats.
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