WARD KELLEY
Long, Sleepless Watches of the Night

from histories of souls

Your fiery death wrenched
my entire life . . .
grief overwhelmed me, of course,
of course, but underneath this severe
pain was a severe doubt
about the very core of life:
where one second we are vibrant
and in love, the next you scream,
engulfed in fire then die horribly . . .
how do we countenance
such deadly caprice?

Your eyes, at the end, will never
leave my soul, your eyes shrieking
through the flames, and I threw
myself on you to attack the fire, my god,
my god, your fingers clawed my skin
like drowning women, only you drowned
in fire, my love, my love, I hugged
you tightly as I tried to absorb
these flames into my own body
and take this fire from you.

Your coffin is lowered,
my soul goes down,
I use my bandaged hands
to hide my tears, my face;
I wish to hide from this world
where one day my love
is living flesh, but the next I watch
her coffin take my soul away . . .
go down, go down . . .

and then, how do we countenance
such caprice without a faith,
without a poem,
without hiding
our faces?

WARD KELLEY
Freedoms

from histories of souls

The boys cheered when your bullet hit the Major's
head, but you yourself felt a tremendous alarm --
all those years a slave, all those years with a white
master, and now you killed a white man; yet
underneath the fear flowed an embarrassment
of exhilaration, and this scared you more . . .
you felt the same richness of attainment as when you kill
a squirrel, only greater and deeper for killing this man.

You see in this new republic all men can be killed,
but will they allow you to live, you with the musket
held at your side, fired once now unloaded?
How quickly a slave can traverse to master,
and really it all depends on who is allowed
to carry the weapon, since you see subservience
can easily become dominance . . . then murder.

Then once you understood you could be
like them, and they could become like you,
and the ills of some men could easily be the ills
of all men . . . then this became no achievement
at all, at all, with this capricious bullet.

It was never what you said . . .
it could never be for who you loved,
and not for mercy or forgiveness
or gentle stoke under a child's chin . . .
this statue was erected because you killed a man;
and the world is just as strange and eluding
on this disturbing side of freedom.