White Anglo-Saxon Protestant

When Philip Levine shoots Hitler, a man

of his species, a man he says is not

absolutely unlike himself,

nor absolutely unlike the WASPs

of Detroit, who looked down on the Jews

and the Blacks of Detroit, and on everyone else,

then I kneel down, there in the kitchen,

bending over till my forehead is touching

the floor, my hands holding each other,

I am praying, for the first time since our son

was hours late, and I threw off my disguise

of not believing in GOD, and I begged,

abjectly, for our boy to come home. The linoleum is

smooth- under my brow, a bulge

of the pattern, like a harrow bank in soil.

I do not think I will get up again.

I think I have found my posture for life.

What I'm seeing about myself and my people

will not be seen and stood upright with,

but I am not upright, I am bowing to the power

of other hearts. I am begging forgiveness

for the gentiles, I am begging forgiveness for myself,

I had not realized I had thought that the WASP

was the regular, the norm, everyone

else a variation on the norm,

and I had not seen that as a child of my parents

 I had privately, as if luxuriously, suffered, I am

bowing to achieve some comfort, making

a human letter in Hebrew or Arabic that

says I honor who knows more that I know,

the saltier smarter heart. I came

from people who thought they were better than anybody,

no one else was quite real to them,

and among themselves they brooded over

the oldest White blood, the bluest White eye, oh I was

theirs, they had me. Until today

I had not seen I shared their vanity,

wanting to hold my head high

for any reason, to be blind to myself

and shine. Low down to the floor there is a small

wind like the one through a vineyard, down

where the root becomes the stem, and the smell

is of zinc, and slate, and tallow earth.

this is where I will live my life,

on the floor of love's vineyard, in the furrow.