Like many-- like most of us I think,
I have been horrified during the last year by the visibility
of racially motivated violence in our country--
the brutality wrought by the police at--
in our name really, in the name of those who employ them.
I don't know if we are experiencing more such violence
or now the cell phone has simply made it documentable,
and it's an extraordinary thing that many, many people
have the means to record, the means of witness.
In November of last year, a young man
named Tamir Rice was murdered in a park in Cleveland, Ohio.
He was 12 years old.
He was playing with a gun-- a plastic toy gun,
and the cops assumed it was real.
So this is a poem in his memory.
The first line-- it's a new poem, not part of the book--
and the first line pours into--
the title rather pours into the first line.
It's called "In Two Seconds."
Remember it's Tamir Rice 2002 to 2014.
In two seconds, the boy's face climbed back down
the 12-year tunnel of its becoming, a charcoal
sunflower swallowing itself.
Who has eyes to see or ears to hear?
If you could see what happens fastest,
unmaking the human irreplaceable,
a star falling into complete gravitational darkness
from all points of itself.
All this, the held loved body into which
entered milk and music, honeying the cells of him,
who sang to him, stroked the nap with a scalp,
kissed the flesh knot after the cord completed
its work of fueling into him the long history of those
whose suffering was made more bearable--
Those who's suffering was made more bearable
by the as yet unknown of him playing alone
in some unthinkable future city, a Cleveland, whatever
that might be.
Two seconds to elapse.
The arc of joy and the conception bed,
the labor of hands repeated until their hands no longer
required attention so that as the woman folded
her hopes for him sank into the fabric of his shirts
and underpants, down they go, swirling down into the mall
of a greater dark.
Treasure box, comic books, pocket knife, bell
from a lost cat's collar, why even
begin to enumerate them when behind every tributary poured
into him comes rushing backward all he hasn't been yet.
Everything that boy could have thought or made, sung
or theorized, built on the quavering but continuous
structure that had preceded him sank
into an absence in the shape of a boy playing
with a plastic gun in a city park in Ohio
in the middle of the afternoon.
When I say two seconds, I don't mean
the time it took him to die.
I mean the lapse between the instant the cruiser lurched
to a halt on the grass between that moment
and the one in which the officer fired his weapon,
the two seconds taken to assess the situation.
And though I believe it is part of the work of art
to try on at least the moment and skin of another,
for this hour I respectfully decline.
I refuse it.
May that officer be visited every night of his life
by an enormity collapsing in front of him
into an incompressible bloom and the voice that howls out of it.
If this is no poem then, with that voice, erase boy
beloved of time who did nothing to no one
and became nothing because of it,
I know that voice is one of the things we call poetry.
It isn't to his killer he's speaking.