COLLECT
…in a way, all of us are responsible for Bo's death, because we've let people like those killers have their way, and decent people have just sat by.
— Mamie Till, 1956
Morning wraps the stars and the dark
that will come again
and so is a promise,
an envelope
in which some dark may be folded
like a list of names,
so first light on the Tallahatchie
is a prayer that light
may be shoaled
by some arm or shoulder
as a pane of light will smoke
until the swollen face emerges
and morning on a magazine's spread
burns into the retinas
the letters of a prayer for the river
and the pine box and the boxcar
on which some light no one will ever remember
has already laid its blessing
and a prayer for Mamie Till
for looking when they told her not to,
for leaving the casket open
so everyone could see
what hatred can do to a body,
what color can do,
so Chicago's breath could settle
through the glass and the suit and into the wounds
to be taken back into the lungs,
a gauze to blot astonishment,
so Mississippi's breath, stolen north,
could swathe him too
then gather like river in our lungs
and keep some part of breath
from entering there again
and so become a prayer
for the breath we did not take
for the words we did not say,
the missing part of breath that makes a silence
in which a body can break the water's calm,
in which everything can be heard,
light peeling from the wounds of the stars
and distant birds that sing like glass,
a clot in the tissue of the sky.