shane mccrae
iPOEM
The Sweet Kids
Shane McCrae is the author of Mule, Blood, and three chapbooks including most recently, Non?ction, which won the Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Competition. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Fence, Gulf Coast and elsewhere, and he has received a Whiting Writer’s Award and a fellowship from the NEA. He teaches in the brief-residency MFA program at Spalding University.
If even the sweet kids Lord become killers How am I spared from killing If some if one becomes a killer Lord and the looked like he was a sweeter boy
Killer he was
Lord than I ever was how am I spared Lord if I was cruel as a child / As killers are to animals
Lord if I beat the neighbor’s dog with a thick metal pipe
Lord if I smashed his nose with the end of the pipe Lord if I wept Lord when I found on the path in the forest
The sparrow with the broken wing Lord if I took it home and killed it
blubbering as I threw it / Against the guest room wall how am I spared If I killed that I could