Let me take you into the room
where I slept in a stranger’s house.
Let me take you into the darkened room
by the amber glow of one small lamp—
into the musty room of the two-story
where I slept the untroubled sleep
of an innocent; then opened my eyes to see,
as if in chiaroscuro, a young man watching me.
In the dim light, his face a brown stone,
the contours of which have eroded with time.
He is the son of that house, the house where
I was boarded the summer before I began school
in America my new country. He’s long past
the age of school boys so why’s he watching
me with his hand restlessly moving in his lap? Done,
he rises without a word or has time silenced him?
It was so long ago. How often did it happen? I don’t know.
I told my mother a live-in domestic working far
from me, and I was taken away. No police were called,
nothing was ever said. I was supposed to forget—
let it sink into the oblivion of words not spoken.
It’s half a hundred years ago, but I never forgot
the boy, the room, the lamp and my fear
the summer before the first grade when I was six.
Ellen June Wright consulted on guides for three PBS poetry series. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week in June 2021, and she is a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna. She also received 2021 and 2022 Pushcart Prize nominations.
