WEBVTT

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Over dinner just
now, among the things

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we were talking about
was how much of teaching

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goes unappreciated
by the student

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until the student is like 30.

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It's from like high school--

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and therefore, how
it's really terrible

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that the whole country is
moving in this direction

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where we want to
quantify what it

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means to be a good teacher in
terms of test scores and things

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like that.

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But still, my grandfather
died when I was 14.

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And still, like last week, I was
like oh, that's what he meant.

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So anyway, this poem
is also for him.

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It's called "Earth and God."

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"And now when I
think of what else

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my grandfather
could have become,

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I do not consider the
30-odd shirt -jacs

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in every pastel shade possible
lining the closet, or the way

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his hat fit meticulously
at that angle on his head,

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or even that I held a straight
razor against his throat day

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after day to shave him.

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I was the only one he let do it.

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Or how he rolled up
his pants to show

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me how the coffee was danced
or the years of his turning

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the corner every Sunday morning
on the stroke of 5 past 9,

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lips moving silently, mumbling
the rosary as he looked up

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to wave Sunday greetings to
Miss Murray, and Miss Esme

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and Mr Mora and Miss Alphonso.

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And though I laugh
now, that had I

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known those shirt -jacs would be
in such fashion 20 years later,

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I would have snatched
them right out

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of the closet with his body
still warm in the ground

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and fix them about my
14-year-old shoulders.

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And what I knew is
that my grandfather was

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the son of an African washer
woman and a French landowner,

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that he could have been all
things in a different world

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at a later time, had his
skin not been so black

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broiled in the coco sun.

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And though I see his
face, quiet and unworried

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as a baby's in my hand,
the skin pulled taut

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as my hands learned
latitude and nuance,

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the way I learned to windmill
the razor like Viv did his bat

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and scrape the gray
hairs of his face

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and against the soft hot
cloth, I do not remember first,

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that he'd been warning my
mother and me from months

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before he even got sick that
the land would be in contention

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and that he wanted us to be
sure to get what was ours.

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Here on the scrubble grass
edges of a worrisome habit,

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when the bartender pours me
the fourth shot and marvels

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at my still lucidity and
intelligent conversation,

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I do not remember first
that my grandfather warned

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that a visitor could
never take just one drink,

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that the second was necessary
to walk out on two feet.

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This, even as he
was signing his name

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to some momentous important
document in Florida,

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turn of century ink pot British
script, Hudley Vincent de Paul

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Bonaire.

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And this is not a
poem about cricket,

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except my grandfather was
once young and fast and black.

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And when he was 80,
I saw him wield a bat

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with such fearsomeness,
that we all stopped our game

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and watched him run and
swing and swing again.

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And it's probably unimportant
that this was no game to him,

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chasing down the bigger boy
beating me up on the street

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in the middle of the game
where my mouth had got me

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in trouble again.

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What I remember is with
what ease an 80-year-old man

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swung the well-heeled
piece of willow

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when he saw threat
to his male heir.

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And I think about his
perfect arm action,

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as he gathered speed,
barefoot on the road that day,

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on the balls of his
feet and breathing hard,

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how he picked up
the bat on the run

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and swung it like
the brushing cutlass

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through the cane stalk
like the flat machete

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through the sweet cocoa pod.

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And though this
is not cricket, I

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remember how he moved
like all the other heroes

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we were mimicking that day, Gus
Logie and Joel Garner, Clive

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Lloyd, or Collis King.

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I do not immediately
remember how

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he taught me to discern fever
grass from j jerry toot bush

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or Shadow bene from
useless weed struggling

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through the red dirt.

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What I remember first
is my grandfather

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running impossibly fast
and impossibly old,

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carrying my safety on the
razor's edge of a bat.

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How he might have
been so much else,

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but beautiful and reposed.

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His leathered face
in my hands, he

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was every prayer he needed
to become, a man of Earth

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and to God and to open throat."

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