Who'd have
thought good crops
Could come from a bad seed?
It was a pretty good line in a really good poem, titled "Look At Me," by
a 17-year-old
African-American poet named Donald. This young man was theoretically
every bit as dangerous as he was gifted.
He was
incarcerated in the WJ Maxey Boys Training School as a violent offender.
I was working with Donald on a documentary called Young Poet
Incarcerated, helping him polish some of his work and rehearse it
before we rolled the camera. We had been given some money by the
National Endowment for the Arts through the Michigan Humanities Council
and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs to cover some of
the costs of making our movie.
The idea of the film was to let Donald use his poetry to give the world
a glimpse into how a kid gets himself locked up before he's old enough
to vote.
As with all of Donald's work, there were some other powerful lines in
that poem:
No cradles, no cribs
I was born in a casket
Living to die
Though I survived among the savages.
or
There is a rose
But with their eyes closed
All they grabbing
Is thorns.
But as we worked our way through each line of "Look At Me," my mind kept
wandering back to those words:
Who'd
have thought good crops
Could come from a bad seed?
Finally I asked him, "Donald, are you telling me that you are a bad
seed?"
"Oh, yes," he said, "I always been bad."
"All your life?"
"All my life."
"You were born that way? A bad seed?"
"Yeah. All my life."
"So you're telling me that a little baby is born evil."
"No, a baby is born in the image of God
. . ."
He stopped and looked down at the floor. "Oh."
"I think maybe that line needs a little work."
"I guess so." And then we went on to work on another poem.
A week later Donald and I were working together again, and we made our
way back around to "Look At Me." This time he pulled out and unfolded a
different piece of paper than the one he had been using. "I did like you
said. I did some work on this since last week."
"Let's hear it."
And he began to read. When he got to the "bad seed" line he paused and
looked up at me, and then kept reciting, giving me the new line from
memory.
Who'd have thought good crops
Could come from a bad seed?
Never a bad seed
Only bad dirt.
It is fairly common these days for people to compliment me for the work
I do with the kids. When this happens, I always feel kind of
embarrassed, and find myself struggling to find ways to explain to them
that I simply feel blessed to have the skills I have, and to get the
opportunity to put all those gifts to use like this.
I only wish that I could let them in on exactly what it was like when
Donald recited:
Never a bad seed,
Only bad dirt,
and smiled, looking at me through eyes that were at once 17
and 1,000
years old. If those people could feel what I felt in that moment, I
would never have to explain a thing.
You can see the entire mini-documentary, Young Poet Incarcerated,
online at http://lostvoices.org.
What I've
Learned So Far...
by Mike Ball is a syndicated feature distributed exclusively by North
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