Poem ("Lord, I have seen...")

And your yellow shoes dance at the corner curb like a brand new

car,

And the buck with the arching pick looks over the new-laid tar

As you cock your eye like a cuckoo bird on a two o'clock note?

When you got so little in steel-rim specs, when you taught that

French,

When you wrote that book and you made that speech in the bot-

tom south,

When you beat that fiddle and sang that role for Othello's mouth,

When you blew that horn for the shirt-sleeve mob and the snaky

wench?

When you boxed that hun, when you raped that trash that you

didn't rape,

When you caught that slug with a belly of fire and a face of gray,

When you felt that loop and you took that boot from a KKK,

And your hands hung down and your face went out in a blast

of grape?

Did the Lord say yes, did the Lord say no, did you ask the Lord

When the jaw came down, when the cotton blossomed out of your

bones?

Are you coming to peace, O Booker T. Lincoln Roosevelt Jones,

And is Jesus riding to raise your wage and to cut that cord?

POEM

Lord, I have seen too much for one who sat

In quiet at his window's luminous eye

KARL J. SHAPIRO

And puzzled over house and street and sky,

Safe only in the narrowest habitat;

Who studies peace as if the world were flat,

The edge of nature linear and dry,

But faltered at each brilliant entity

Drawn like a prize from some magician's hat.

Too suddenly this lightning is disclosed:

Lord, in a day the vacuum of Hell,

The mouth of blood, the ocean's ragged jaw,

More than embittered Adam ever saw

'When driven from Eden to the East to dwell,

The lust of godhead hideously exposed!