—For John Earl Reese, a 16-year-old, shot by Klansmen
through the window of a café in Mayflower, Texas,
where he was dancing, October 22, 1955.
Before the bird’s song
you hear its quiet
which becomes part of the song
and lives on after,
struck notes bright
in silence
as the room’s damp—
wallpaper and wall
muffling the high cicadas’
whine, mumbling
talk from another room—
hangs like the thought
of a roof in the midst of rain
long after the joists
have been brought down.
So the quiet
syllables crowded
full-throats once the talkers
have gone away,
and a young man’s voice
becomes a young man’s
silence, all
he did not say,
which nothing keeps
saying in the empty room
between the pines
that hold the quiet
of the song he cannot sing,
the sound of a room
without sound
in the middle of what
anyone can hear.