THE POLO GROUNDS

It’s August, nineteen forty-five.
The atom bomb about to kick

Hiroshima, Nagasaki down.
In the Bronx, mom set to pick

my name. Across the Harlem
Giants can’t hit a lick,

lineup in a slump, not
a single black man on this team.

Can the pol from Independence
intervene, turn back such fair shame?

Ah, Little Boy, war’s devastation
penetrates to knitted bone.

Light wind cuts its way across
which town? Rubble

vaporized may float
down the mouth of what

sacred river? Civilization,
a day no one will get over.