This is a poem from a book, Good News About the Earth.
This is a woman kind of poem.
It's the hardest poem I've ever written.
And after I wrote it, I was very glad.
I like to express gratitude to Gwendolyn Brooks
for writing a poem called The Mother.
Do you know that poem?
Because if she had not written The Mother,
I would not have been able to write The Lost Baby Poem.
The time I dropped your almost body down.
Down to meet the waters under the city and run.
One with the sewage to the sea.
What did I know about waters rushing back?
What did I know about drowning or being drowned?
You would have been born into winter.
In the year of the disconnected gas and no car.
We would have made the thin walk over Genesee Hill
into the Canada wind to watch you slip
like ice into stranger's hands.
You would have fallen naked as snow into winter.
If you were here I could tell you
these and some other things.
If I am ever less than a mountain
for your definite brothers and sisters,
let the rivers pour over my head.
Let the sea take me for a spiller of seas.
Let black men call me stranger.
Always for your never named sake.
[APPLAUSE]