I have three more for you, two of them are long
and one's a little bit shorter.
I started this poem on February 3
and it's about the Atlanta child murders.
And I started of course, before the series was on TV,
but they were showing those scenes from it
the whole time and that.
And one night I was just thinking,
I felt like writing a poem and that popped into my head
and then I said oh, I don't want to, but it is really sometimes
as if you aren't--
you're not quite in control.
Sometimes I read my stuff and I feel, wow,
what is going on in that brain.
Anyway I couldn't really work on it
at night it was too creepy for me to write,
and I write like from 11 to midnight and 10 to 12
in the morning when I'm not teaching or something.
So I just worked in the morning.
So anyway it's so recent that it's still
got all these little things I think that it is finished now,
but if I make a mistake because I haven't really
read it before.
This is called The Good Shepherd:
Atlanta 1981, 81 is when the murders I guess basically
stopped.
I lift the boy's body from the trunk,
set it down, then with my foot push it over the embankment.
I watch it roll down into the river
and feel I'm rolling with it.
Feel the first cold slap of the water,
then I wheeze and fall down on one knee.
So tired, so cold, Lord I need a new coat, not polyester,
but wool, new and pure like the little lamb I killed tonight.
With my right hand, that same hand that hits with such force,
I push myself up gently.
I know what I'd like, some hot cocoa by the heater.
The boy's bones scraped clean and ground to nothing.
Oh, come lie down with me.
Once home I stand at the kitchen sink letting the water run
till it overflows the pot.
Then I remember the blood in the bathroom, and so upstairs.
I take the cleanser, begin to scrub the tubs, tile,
the toilet bowl, then the bedroom, mop, vacuum, and dust:
rag work, work for the joy of it,
for the Black boys who know too much but not
enough to stay away.
And sometimes the girl, the girls too: how their hands grab
at my ankles, my knees, and don't I lead them
like a good shepherd?
I stand at the sink where the water is still
overflowing the pot,
turn off the faucet, then heat the water, and sit down.
After the last sweet mouthful of chocolate burns its way
down my throat I open the library book,
the one on mythology, and begin to read.
Saturn, it says, devours his children.
Yes, it's true, I know it.
An ordinary man, though, a man like me, eats and is full.
Only God is never satisfied.
[APPLAUSE]