This is my newest book, it just came out last month.
It's called They-- it's got an ungrammatical title,
it's called They Feed They Lion.
I'll read the title poem in a minute,
and perhaps make some sense out of the title.
It's got a lot of poems about living in Detroit,
and growing up there and coming of age,
and I'd like to read one first called
"Saturday Sweeping," which is a poem about the worst
time in my life.
When I lived in Detroit during the Korean War,
I think that was probably the worst time of anybody's life
who was alive then.
I felt enormously alone and isolated,
and I was trying to be a poet and I
had very little encouragement.
And I didn't go to the war, I didn't choose to,
and I felt a little bit--
the way your culture makes you feel whenever
you do something decent in America,
you feel like a real shit and a coward.
You know, like Huck Finn when he takes Jim
across to the free territories, it feels like a betrayer.
Well, I didn't do anything that difficult or brave.
And it's a thing that young people
do today, young men do today.
I think with a lot more ease and a lot more
intelligence and understanding, and they
give each other a lot more support
than we gave each other then.
We were all so isolated.
It's called "Saturday Sweeping," and it's just
about living alone at that time.
It was written much later, though.
It was written just after the riots in Detroit,
the more recent ones of '67.
It was written in '67.
And I sort of look forward--
I'm sitting there in 1967 and looking back
and seeing what's happened, but it's mainly about then.
"Saturday sweeping with an old broom counting the strokes
back and forth.
The dust sprays up silver in the February sun
and comes down gray.
Soft straw muzzle poking in, bringing out
scraps of news, little fingers and signatures.
Everybody's had this room one time or another
and never thought to sweep.
Outside the snows stiffen, the roofs loosen their last teeth
into the streets.
Outside it's 1952, Detroit, unburned,
stumbles away from my window over the drained roofs
toward the river to scold its useless hands.
Half the men in this town are crying
in the snow, their eyes blackened
like Chinese soldiers.
The gates are closing at Dodge Main and Wyandotte Chemical;
they must go home to watch the kids scrub their brown faces
or grease cartridges for the showdown.
If anyone knocks on your door he will
be oil flecked or seaborne.
He'll be bringing word from the people of the ice drifts,
or the great talking dogs that save the Jews.
Meanwhile our masters will come on television
to ask for our help.
Here, the radiator's working, stove says don't touch,
and the radio's crying, I don't get enough.
I'm my keeper, the only thing I've got,
sweeping out my one-room life while the sun's still up."
Last time I read that poem, I remember
a woman asked me what--
who were the great talking dogs that saved the Jews?
I realized it was immensely obscure.
When I was a little boy my grandfather told
me folk tales of dogs, they were about dogs
that would come to the ghettos in imperialist Russia
and warn the Jews that the Kazakhs were coming,
or some hostile force to kill them.
Never people would come, only animals.
And I thought later on what a wonderful irony there was.