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Prison or Poetry

Christine Lassiter 
I sit in my truck
watching the rain,
waiting for dusk
when I'll do poetry
with teens in a treatment center,
prison or treatment teens
sent here from first nations
all over the country.

Last week I brought a book
by Native American poets.
called Returning the Gift.
They picked Simpson's poem "Sweating it Out"'
set it to drums and chanted the verse.
As they chanted the last line,
We learn to sit in our earth and love it,
truth whispered  through the room like dawn.

Others liked Smith's book Close to Death.
They chose a poem called "The Undertaker".
One played the reluctant mortician,
the others, gangbangers,
I, the grieving mother.
As I pleaded with the 14 year old under taker
saying, Fix my boy, fix my boy,
tears filled my eyes.
With sudden fierce motherlove
I wanted to save all of them,
to kiss the bedtime cheeks
of the savage punks 
who suck their thumbs 
when no one is looking.

I get out of my truck

and they are waiting inside.
In my hands,
the poems feel
so small.

Matt's written a poem about boots with an attitude,
a hackysaking attitude of love,
The others laugh like kids at Saturday cartoons
and his eyes shine with surprise.

Robbie's poem is about wild dogs
and you're running like hell
and you fall 
and instead of ripping you apart,
they lick your hand.
Robbie plays the drum
which is the sacred heart
which builds to pounding terror,
breaks,
then with solemn awe,
starts again.
Leila's been writing and writing and writing,
poetry her new addiction,
pope heroin down in his pews,
bloody knuckles of shame.
Please, I pray, let this be
her last addiction.

Robbie drums again as Luke
chants to a dead fiend
who over dosed in a wheelchair at fourteen,
paralyzed by a bullet the year before,
His song has no words, only grief
hands moving graceful flurries
voice high and straining and strong.
After the song, he holds his throat,
wounded by the sounds of
his own strange pain.

I rise to leave,
pick up my poems,
make promises for next week -
yes, I'll type your poem,
yes, I'll bring the book again
yes, yes, yes.
I'll lavish love in all the little ways I can
but it will be the words of your heart,
like glowing stones in the sweat lodge,
the words of your heart
that will lead you
through pain to somewhere
and like the cool night air
when you leave the dark inferno,
something good will be there.
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