Thursday, June 5, 2008

Robert F. Kennedy, 11/20/25 - 06/06/68

Wave Hill 21

Bobby Kennedy

The train was a black centipede
moving through the blue-dust
a television cast across my mother’s pleated red skirt
spread like a fan over her knees.
She sat on the floor, her legs
kicked out to one side,
her white-socked foot
tapping rhythmically
until the newsman’s voice,

And now the car bearing the body,
draped in the flag


stopped it,

her heart breaking all the way
across the back of America.


from my second book, The Circle Line, forthcoming from The Backwaters Press in 2009

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