The man said I could see them if I wanted
He said America would never be
A place where we could live together not at

Least in my lifetime but the damned don't see

No important differences between the Ne-

gro and the White the damned don't see no bad

In folks if what bad they done they ain't free-

ly chose to do the damned don't see no good

In folks if what good they done they ain't hoped

To do and the man he said part of momma

Varina part of daddy Jeff alread-

y was burning in Hell I ought to join them



He said we might see good from seeing each other

Tortured we might finally see each other


About this poem
"One morning, as she drove her carriage home from running errands, Varina Davis saw a mixed-race child being beaten by a black woman, presumably his mother. She took the child, a 7-year-old named Jim Limber, from the woman and brought him home to live with herself and her husband, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America. Limber was, in turn, taken from the Davises a little over a year later, when the Union Army captured them in Irwinville, Ga., and he never saw them again."
-Shane McCrae

About Shane McCrae
Shane McCrae is the author of "The Animal Too Big to Kill" (Persea Books, 2015). He teaches at Oberlin College and lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

***
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2016 Shane McCrae. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate