For a long time, I've thought of this moment
and I don't know how to do this moral number.
Any moral number I've got seems to be every moral person's
moral number.
The poetry of witnesses for whom that the people
who we stick little things in people's eyes
and turn them around into the center of the brains or they
the one reading the poems.
Or is it me feeling good about looking at it because I'm
in a position of superiority.
So I feel a strange mixture in writing a poem
to where I have a superior moral understanding.
But this is something that has plagued me
for a long time, two images.
A childhood friend of mine, Billy Don Bolden when
he was 15 years old was caught in a sexual act out of the woods
by a white game warden in Alabama.
And some scuffle ensued in which the game warden was killed
and Billy Don Bolden tried to get away
in the game warden's car.
And was convicted of a first degree murder
and was about to be tried for rape
and he did not do the death penalty.
And I imagine he did kill the man
and I can imagine also the difficulty
that peculiar situation, I knew the guy and he's not a killer.
He's a guy who's probably glad to be having
sex out in the woods, but he certainly did not
mean to get into a scuffle.
And it's plagued me all my life his position,
he's finally out of jail now.
But I remembered one other thing,
which was that my mother used to be in the Ladies' Home
Missionary Society.
And they were always feeling good about being--
I think missionaries and helping the poor people in Africa.
And I remember being tired and being outside and playing
and coming into the house, when a slide show of a missionary's--
[AUDIO OUT]
When I get down to the bottom of things, it was a dark green,
stiff billed soldier's cap, stamped
with a white numerals of one of the enigmatic insignia
of the Alabama National Guard.
Why keep it now?
The boy who wore it, Billy Don Bolden,
has been a man out of prison for a long time.
We used to play a fast hide and seek
in the woods just south of the house
where the Ladies' Home Missionary Society sipped
iced tea, as they watched slides of African children scrabbling
to scoop handfuls of ants into their mouths.
Just once, I brought him, thirsty, inside the house,
and the good ladies, taking in the darkness of his nappy head,
looked so aghast.
You would have thought one of the heathens
had stepped down naked from the white bed sheet they were using
as a screen and now was debating whether to eat
their earrings or their ears.
You know what it is to be "it," don't you?
Since I drove up toward a cemetery with a girl
and we lay down half naked, and rose up naked,
with the horns blaring, and the long row of headlights shining
in our eyes, I've studied to memorize the ground
rules in the South.
One.
God's watching all the time.
Two.
Every cemetery hides a church, it's
always the same with the two naked bodies, one moment
alone in the darkness and the next, two families in
convention at the ten upturned toes.
Mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles,
infamous and demented cousins, like patriots
are praising every possible outcome of every possible war.
Or certain familiar verses of the national anthem that
the singer cannot quite bring to the tongue.
The time machine that changes the ludicrously tragic
to the mildly preposterous will arrive in 20 minutes.
If luck holds, no one mentions marriage or pulls a gun.
But if you're 15 and Black and a white game warden
comes on you with a white girl in the woods in Alabama in 1964,
one of the things that might happen is murder.
If the white man's dead and you're caught in his car
with a gun, the jury takes less than an hour
and you're building years, lollygagging and jawing
over the cafe au lait
in one of the bistros of Kilby Prison,
before the time machine turns into a bus
and lets you off with the night shift outside a laundry
in Montgomery.
Old friend, I think of you running a brush
across some senator's pajamas, then of the slide
kicking into the light.
It's somewhere in the Congo circa 1959.
The ladies clicked their dentures into smiles;
King hasn't marched yet.
We've just stumbled in out of the sunshine,
it's that instant when we're blind
and passing through the beam.
The feast of ants is painted on your back,
it's like all the past now, it's black and white.