"April Fourth."
April 4th.
It's a date that most white people forget.
And it was on that day two years ago
that Martin Luther King was murdered.
This is not an elegy exactly.
It's about other things as well.
But I wrote it that night.
It has to do with that event.
This enormous event in our lives.
April Fourth.
I throw open the door and someone
like the night walks in.
A moist wind in the doorway, a breath of flowers in the wake
of this august presence.
I was sitting for hours watching the coal of the cigarette
rising and falling.
Finally one must do something,
The evening, I thought, the evening
was the last evening as usual.
I was thinking of heroes whose knuckles shine
as they curl around a rifle.
I was thinking of my brother who brings me my head in a basket
and it won't do.
Let me make myself empty.
I can live without sleeping tonight.
I can live without dreams of the King awash
on his balcony, half of his neck and face in another kingdom.
In the morning, I will not understand.
The mountains surfacing from their mortal darkness,
a scum of yellow flowers, the great oak
crying with a thousand voices--
all that wrinkles like heat and disappears into thin air.