Two Poems from the 60s
Night Thoughts in Tennessee
Under the quiet, early stars
the mockingbird wakes up and calls to you.
Under the sharp smile of the moon
the road is white.
The dust is only half-asleep.
Your footprints for tomorrow
already are half-formed.
Revolution will bear
miraculous children.
It is useful to you to lie here,
scheming while the short night starts.
-- 1968
(Untitled)
I
As children we have dreamed of doors
that closed behind us just in time
that led to beasts and teeth, great grinding
noises, woozy heights...
-- that closed in time.
I have come out of the South.
This is me thinking to me.
I am here.
In this roadside cafe I order a grapefruit.
It comes. I sugar it, stick in my spoon
and lift one piece up to my mouth.
I put it in. It is grapefruit.
I am no longer there.
The great silver bus stands outside,
still running.
I am in a white building
on the flat snowy fields of Illinois.
The morning is early
and as cold as porcelain.
This is grapefruit, brisk and clear
like the snow,
like the sky.
It is sweet like the lips of children,
like my own lips -- me --
when I was a child and ate grapefruit
at the Sunday morning table before my father.
The juice fills my mouth,
it goes everywhere, it is
touching me.
Nothing has happened
that I can’t answer for.
Nothing, and yet for a long time
I have tucked in my arms,
tucked in my legs,
shut up my eyes,
my nose,
my mouth,
been very careful with my heart
and have ridden like this
through the last two years.
Like riding a bus through dangerous country,
curled up in your seat, alone
under your lamp, reading
to pass the time and hoping the bus will not stop
till you get there.
The grapefruit touches me.
I am here.
I hope this
will never happen again.
But it will happen again.
My country will hurt me again.
The South is only part of the whole,
and I have learned what I am part of.
Tennessee! Alabama!
I have lived in the one,
tasted the other.
Your people are uneasy in their souls.
I have looked in their faces.
I’ve been hated and feared by both colors
and hated and feared them both in return.
I have loved your blacks
but I am white
(there lies the problem).
My love has been
scared out of me.
It has drained away.
There was never enough.
-- What right to go there?
-- What right to pick up the burden,
standing there, between the races?
(The burden was history,
the whole history of the South,
i.e., the memories and habits
of two men,
one with his foot on the chest of the other.
They’re both prisoners.)
What right?
We went on account
of the sufferings of the man
with the foot on his chest.
It’s better to ask:
Did we do any good?
I must think about this.
The bus driver’s ready to leave,
the passengers climbing into the bus.
Come with me.
I must go.
II
I sit here in the bus by the window
and watch the telephone wires swinging past.
The black poles stand up from the fields
one by one, in the sky.
And a white farm house,
trim as a ship, an elm for a mast,
turns and we leave it behind.
There are shocks of cut corn still in the fields,
yellow as summertime in the snow.