How to Experience Remorse as Fire
Everything is on fire,
And I am very young
And it isn’t fair.
Where they rattle around in the green Summer
I tell them I have been there
But I have not ever been there
I am just thinking of the smell of a fire,
And how much I like that
It comforts me in a peculiar way.
But then there are the other fires.
I didn’t know at the time that I could create sharp little fires
By ignoring my father
Or by wandering off
When I was supposed to be
Thinking some officially assigned thing
My father told me that all Negroes were lazy
He learned that in the Army
My Mother said all colored women carry straight razors
She learned that in South Carolina
The smoke of all the fires is on my heels
Walking, turning away
It stings and follows me like an upright shadow
At the pool, at the park,
In the chess club, in junior high school
Always looking over my shoulder, me, and it.
A friend of mine kept a journal of all the girls
He liked, or wanted to like. He wrote down
If he saw their underwear, or if he could
See down their shirts.
None of them were black girls
They never made the list.
Children tried to pitch pennies into a coffee can
The pennies landed everywhere but inside
Clearly the distance was too great.
I played occasionally
I had no idea where coins might land
But it was my hand, now, that might skew them
In a general direction
That I wanted, at least.
My parents were as good as dead
The lingering thin fog will not abate
But I know it is here, and I watch it
And though I make no room for it
It still is pervasive, ubiquitous
I know it infiltrates my clothes
I am guilty of being exposed
I know others smell it on me.
The old cottonwoods line the slow river
They like having wet feet
They snow on us almost all Summer
And the stuff of their birth
Can be used to ignite fire, easily
With just one or two sparks
From disparate striking stones.
© Donald Warren Hayward 2020
