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Poetry flows from King's dream

Carmelo Delgado's book includes many works based on the ideals of the American icon.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published January 16, 2006

BROOKSVILLE - Carmelo Delgado is a native Puerto Rican who lives in Hernando County and writes poetry about American icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He has a new book out called The Man and His Dream . The words in the book are less about the man and more about the dream.

King's dream.

Delgado's too.

This is from his poem called The Martyr and His Dream :

He dreamed of justice and equal rights for all

Regardless of color of their skin

He dreamed the sons of owners and the sons of slaves

Could someday share the same table and same hall

In search of the golden dream

Out there in the promised land

Hoping for a better life

Just across the other side

Delgado is 71 years old. He is married to a Springstead High School Spanish teacher. He always wears his purple-stoned college ring.

"I believe in the American Dream, but not if you don't take the necessary steps to make it real," he said in the week leading up to this Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. "Some people believe the American Dream will happen nicely without much effort. The opportunities are there, but you've got to work for it. Nothing comes easy."

The book, which Delgado self-published through Dorrance Publishing in Pittsburgh, includes poems in both English and Spanish that he wrote from 1967 to just last year. They are about Sept. 11, love and war, growing up in the ghetto and even old New York Mets star Tug "Ya Gotta Believe!" McGraw. But the overriding themes are peace, equality and opportunity.

All things in which Delgado believes.

He was born April 28, 1934, in Collores de Humacao, Puerto Rico, and moved alone to the South Bronx in New York City after he finished the ninth grade. He says he had eight bucks when he arrived.

At 27, though, he enrolled in high school classes in the evenings while working factory jobs making ladies' handbags and jewelry cases and then doing metal work. He graduated at 30.

Then he started taking classes at the City College of New York. He later became the first person in his family to get a degree. But when he was at CCNY, in the late '60s, he drove a yellow cab on nights and weekends.

"And that is a schooling," he said. "You learn about dealing with people, knowing different people, getting to know different characters - people who are mad at the world, mad at the cab system, maybe just mad. But you try to get them home and you try to get an insight. The different characters, the different cultures, getting together in a big city - a city of everything.

"A lot of money.

"A lot of poverty."

Delgado drove the cab for 21/2 years. It took him from gritty Spanish Harlem to ritzy Park Avenue and from Coney Island on the rough southern tip of Brooklyn to Riverdale in the tony northern top of the Bronx.

"There were times," he said, "when you had to take your chances and avoid your prejudging ideas."

He read the New York tabloids. The Daily News was his favorite. He followed Martin Luther King.

April 4, 1968, he was in class at CCNY when he heard the news that King had been assassinated while standing on a hotel balcony in Memphis.

"It was his philosophy that really drew me to him," he said. "The idea of equality without going to war."

Delgado later got a master's degree in public administration from New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He worked as a parole officer for 22 years and moved to Florida in 1993.

He has always written poetry, ever since he was a boy back in Puerto Rico, but in the past he kept his work in a briefcase and showed it only to his family and friends.

Until now.

This is from The Martyr and His Dream :

And when we look around us today, we might observe

That various fractions of his dream have become real

But yet, though many hurdles have been truly conquered

There are still miles to go before we rest

This is our world, dear friends

No one knows his final bell

Man does know where he was born

Yet never where he will end

--Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

[Last modified January 16, 2006, 17:38:04]