The 14th Amendment

I insist on it.
Insist on it, I shout
at the well-groomed TV news anchor

who began his show picturing storm clouds
crossing Texas and headed up the Great Plains
as if forgetting this forecast could also be metaphor

raising all are created equal
from rhetorical flourish to a bold
movement invigorating the Union.

If we don’t insist on it, drafters
will again craft forgetfulness into
a contrary rhetorical flourish, as in

Plessy v. Ferguson’s 1896 separate but equal,
and pass it from generation to generation
as if forced separate could ever be equal.

The Supreme Court reasserted the 14th Amendment
in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
The US Constitution. The 14th Amendment, I shout
at the news anchor reading his script. Insist on it.

Margaret Rozga, UWM at Waukesha Professor of English Emerita, served as the 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate and the 2021 inaugural artist/scholar in residence at the UW Milwaukee at Waukesha Field Station. Her most recent book is Restoring Prairie (Cornerstone Press 2024).