When I Am Gone

(For all children who wondered about the tragic event of April 4, 1968 at Memphis.) My children, my children, remember the day
When the Drum Major of Freedom's parade went away.
Stop crying now little children and listen
And you will know for the future what really did happen.

You will know why your father was solemn and grim
And why mother's eyes were wet at the rim.
You will know why the flags flew at half mast

If time is an arrow, what is its target

If a Flexible Flyer is the sled I had as a child, when may I become a child again

Do you need help digging the potatoes out of your garden of insults

Do you plan to vote in the next election

Is our country headed in the right direction or the wrong direction
and what did the bulldozer tell the yellow helmet’s ear

Which part of your body is like biting into a ripe peach
which part shames you like a rotten banana

The fellow talking to himself is me,
Though I don't know it. That's to say, I see
Him every morning shave and comb his hair
And then lose track of him until he starts to care,
Inflating sex dolls out of thin air
In front of his computer, in a battered leather chair
That needs to be thrown out . . . then I lose track
Until he strides along the sidewalk on the attack

for Vincent Warren Behind the black water tower under the grey

1.

If that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me,
as he is, shouldn’t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said?

If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then,
shouldn’t he have warned me he’d even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront?

I’m a child then, yet already I’ve composed this conscience-beast, who harries me:
is there anything else I can say with certainty about who I was, except that I, that he,

could already draw from infinitesimal transgressions complex chords of remorse,

She said: “I’m god and all
of this and that world and love
garbage and slaughter all the time
and spring once a year. Once a year
I like to love. You can adjust
to the discipline or not,
and your sacrificial act
called ‘Fruitfulness in Decay’

Interesting that I have to live with my skeleton.
It stands, prepared to emerge, and I carry it
with me—this other thing I will become at death,
and yet it keeps me erect and limber in my walk,
my rival.

What will the living see of me
if they should open my grave but my bones
that will stare at them through hollow sockets

People pray to each other. The way I say "you" to someone else,
respectfully, intimately, desperately. The way someone says
"you" to me, hopefully, expectantly, intensely ...
—Huub Oosterhuis You who I don’t know I don’t know how to talk to you

The instructor said,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here