Winner of Antioch’s Martin Luther King Day annual Reggie Moore Scholarship Award shares his poem
By Allen Payton
Sage Bennett, a sophomore at Antioch High School, was the winner of this year’s Reggie Moore Scholarship Award, which was presented to him during Monday’s annual Antioch Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Celebration.
The $400 scholarship is in memory of the late Councilman Reggie Moore who was the first African-American elected to the Antioch City Council. It was presented by former Mayor Wade Harper and Moore’s widow Dashon and family.
Sage shared his poem based on this year’s theme, United by the Dream, that day and with our readers, here:
Change
By Sage Bennett
Change is a word,
Meaning a difference in ways,
Like from black to white,
Years and then to days
Change is inevitable,
As some people come to fear,
Change is in the workings,
And change is with us, in this new year
Dr. Martin Luther King,
A man of great word,
He was killed for what he preached,
As some thought it was absurd.
He often spoke of a greater future,
One where we can love, cherish, and nurture,
One where his four little children would not be bound by discrimination,
One where he might still be alive,
if not for his assassination
We are able to sit here,
Together,
In this room today,
While fifty-three years ago the blacks would be all sent away,
Given by the Creator,
A set of “unalienable rights”,
Given to all men by the Declaration,
Not just the whites
Segregation brought separation,
lost communication, and fright,
Things we seen often in the day,
And often in the night
Oppression in the media,
Police Brutality in the streets,
Social injustice in the schools,
And again so it repeats
You can’t have a house,
without a door,
You can’t have a school,
without a teacher,
Although I could go on,
The point is you can’t have the dream,
without the dreamer
So Dream on.
Although change is slow,
From what we can see,
Change is happening everywhere,
And it’s coming with the fee
By following his theme,
We could turn dream into reality,
We could save this world’s credibility,
And save it from fatality,
Our country, our world, can be much better than it seems,
Stand with me, together, United by the Dream.
