For Ms. Wilson

When you know a man in jail, you try to forget
the newspaper, his mugshot and all his hands have done.
You try to remember his humanity. 

It’s easy, when he smiles often, does
all his work well and asks for more,
says he’s trying to change, and acts like he is.

When you know a man in jail and he goes to trial,
with all that evidence against him you can’t ignore,
you still try not to see how easy it was for him to kill.

It was a robbery gone bad.  What could he have been
if he had always been fed, had a good education, felt safe
and sheltered in his life?  You ask yourself questions

when the man goes to prison, convicted by jury. 
When he passes the GED on the day he receives his sentence,
and when that sentence is execution, you go to your office

and close the blinds.  You cry remembering that this man
stands as tall as your own son, is the same age.  Your student
is someone’s son.  And when the man is executed, even two years

later, you remember his name, his story, his GED score,
and sometimes you still cry, while you enroll a student
who is more than just another inmate, another executed man.

Raina J. León, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in Boxcar Poetry Review and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade among others with forthcoming work in OCHO, African American Review, Black Arts Quarterly and Poem Memoir Story.  She is a graduate of Teachers College Columbia University and a friend to the beautiful artists of the louderARTS Project and Acentos series.

This poem was a 2007 Pushcart Prize Nominee.

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