One of the people--
I've been in love with several dead people.
Crazy Horse Lakota I'm talking about.
You know the great warrior Crazy Horse Lakota?
Chief Tashunka Witco.
Crazy about him.
And David, the King of Israel.
And I have a series of poems from the Book of David.
They were written because I was riding in a car with a friend--
I have a friend who knows the Bible so well--
and I was saying, if David was so wonderful and so interesting,
I wish there was a Book of David.
She said, well, so why don't you write one?
And something went ping.
And so I have some poems from the Book of David.
I read these poems in Jerusalem, do you believe that?
And I thought people were going to stone me or something,
but everybody liked it.
In fact, you know what happened?
They had-- and this was an international poetry
conference--
and they had each of the featured poets read a selection
from classic poetry and they gave me
a Psalm of David's to read, though they
didn't know about these poems.
And when I finished it, people were saying,
oh, that sounded just like scripture.
That was so good.
And I was thinking, now, that-- he's their boy.
I mean, why do they think I wrote this?
He is interesting.
But anyway.
I think David was very interesting because I think
the questions David raises are the questions that certainly
Americans ought to raise if they don't.
And that is, what is the nature of man?
What is the nature of what I am?
I began to think about it-- when I have a very dear friend who's
a novelist, Wayne Karlin is his name,
I recommend his work to you.
He's a wonderful novelist.
He's a poet.
I get annoyed because he writes better poems than I do
and he's a novelist.
He's not supposed to.
And he is a Vietnam veteran.
And when he thinks about-- he was a helicopter gunner--
and what he thinks about--
what is he?
And then I think about David who was, as the Bible says,
a man after God's own heart.
And he was a warrior, a killer, and a poet,
and a dancer, and a singer.
What is the nature of what we are--
which gets down to the questions that aren't always asked.
I have to around thinking.
What am I?
What are we, really?
Where do we come from?
Where are we going?
Anyway, I'd like to read a few David poems.
Oh, let's see.
"Son of Jesse."
Nowhere in the Bible is David's mother mentioned.
"Son of Jesse."
"My father had eight sons, seven for keeping.
Somewhere, there is a chronicle naming my mother.
How could I be woman true, dancing in a house of men?
Even when I gathered foreign wives and concubines,
I would tend them as I tended sheep.
But when I ripped my robe, and wailed, and wept upon the Earth,
I was grieving for men and I knew it:
for my Lord, my brothers, fathers, sons."