On the feast of Saint Augustine, I've decided to post excerpts from my long poem Pick It Up and Read,which was published as a chapbook by Finishing Line Press in 2008. I am posting the pieces that related particularly to Augustine, and then spin off into something more personal.
Pick
it up and read,
sang
the child's voice beyond the wall.
The
first word was SAID.
Three
children -
a
boy and two girls,
played
with a dog and a cat.
White
children with brown hair
whose
plain names excited me
to
hear in the air from my own mouth.
I
had trouble telling
through
from thought,
though
from thorough.
My
father picked me up at school.
We
walked by the statue of Saint Agnes,
through
the cement arch
from
schoolyard to street.
I
thought about knowing how to read SAID
though,
by itself, it was lying alone in a corner,
but
put it behind someone,
and
it opens its mouth to a thorough coverage
of
the news of the day.
Pick it up and Read
(II)
You hated that your
father saw your teenaged body
in the bathhouse,
bleated greedily about
grandchildren.
Even then, your joy was not in the pears, their taste,
the juice running down your neck,
not in the picking,
but in the stealing,
the stealing,
then, the thought of stealing.
Pick it up and read
Pick it up and read,
sang the child's voice beyond the wall.
Don't leave that garden
until you remember
those tears from your body.
The stirrings stayed
never left you
haunted you with dreams
of sweaty couplings,
ragged cries of
delight.
Pick it up and read ( III)
In October, I thought the paper lied
about Nickel Mines and the one room school
where the milkman
lined up ten Amish girls
in front of the
classroom
and shot blood and brains
on the blackboard.
My red-haired cousin, eight years old,
the one with garden genes like me,
the one who shared a grandfather,
fell still alive, though,
a bullet through her jaw.
Pick it up and read,
sang the child's voice beyond the wall.
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