RODNEY KING: ANTITHESIS TO MARTIN LUTHER KING

With Rodney King’s death, Greg ‘The Gadfly’ Doyle brings back a poem he wrote after the 1992 L.A. race riots

Shortly after the 1992 riot, I penned this poem and later published it in my first book (The Sting of the Gadfly, Gregory Allen Doyle, Lifevest Publishing, CO, pp 106-107) in 2005. It summed up my feelings and assessment of the mess that followed. As I have surmised then and contend now, little has changed.

ON RODNEY KING
By Gregory Allen Doyle

If e’er there was a time or place to not judge something on its face,
Then let the heralds cease to sing cacophony to Rodney King.
No doubt the pundits, meaning well, subject us all to living hell.
The truth is no less hard to take and harder yet in Riot’s wake.

If justice is the end you sought, then by what means should it be sought?
For if your trial’s in the street, then justice you will never mete.
No fouler symbol Rodney brings; antithesis to Martin King.
For Rodney lived above the laws while Martin served a higher cause.

The loudest voices in the fray forgot the words in which to pray.
Instead they love to castigate and spew their epithets of hate.
And all the while, as tension swells, these harlequins condemn themselves.
And do the greatest human harm; to save a foot, they lose an arm.