Well, when you report, your currency is words.
And the written word is very important,
as well as the oral word, which we're having here.
And when I was in Ireland, I had an experience
which left me penniless in that currency.
I met an illiterate man.
And I had to go to Ireland to meet a man who
did not read at all or write.
And I didn't know it until about the third week
in knowing him he was so verbally alive in his speaking
manner.
That I really never guessed it until I handed him a poem.
And then he said, would you read it to me?
And I did.
And we were very good friends.
He had to go to Germany.
And I knew that I would have to go to the north on a reading
tour before he got back.
So I wanted to leave him a message no just to say goodbye.
So I realized that somebody else would
have to read the poem to him.
And so I had to write the poem where
you hide all little messages inside it, because you want
the man or the voice that's delivering
it to not to embarrass him,
But still you want to say something true.
So it was a very hard poem to write.
I mentioned in here Cherokee.
That's because my great grandfather was Cherokee.
I never mentioned this in the States
before because there seemed to be such a fad in mentioning
your Indian relatives.
And so I found that in Ireland though,
it seemed very exotic to mention this.
So I mentioned that he was very fascinated by this.
So this is my poems called Love Poem to be
read to an illiterate friend.
I have had to write this down in my absence and yours.
These things happen.
Thinking of a voice added, I imagine a sympathy outside us
that protects the message from what can't help being said.
The times you kept your secret putting on glasses
or glancing into a page with interest
give again the hurt you've forgiven
pretending to be one of us.
So the hope of love translates as the series of hidden moments
where we like to think someone was fooled into it.
Who was I then who filled these days with illegible warnings?
The marriage is broken.
The land pillaged by speculators.
No word for a stranger.
This island where I thought the language was
mine has left me lonely and innocent
as you, or that friend who let you copy
his themes until the words became pictures of places
he would never go.
For that, I call you Cherokee after my own lost tribes.
For that, I have buried white feathers have
torn the clod of grass from the roadside for which these words
must find you off the page.