Lao Rubert

Three Poems

Attending the Hearing

-for Darryl Hunt, wrongfully convicted

      and incarcerated for 19 years

Sitting together in the hearing, your foot tapping,

shirt damp with sweat,

you insisted on sitting in the same courthouse

that locked you up for nineteen years,

nine of them  after proof of your innocence.

Your body took over, tapping your feet

in a song of post-traumatic stress,

surrounded again by officials who wanted to lock you away.

You - courageous as any military officer -

stood your ground, knowing  that your body, your being,

was physical evidence of their transgressions.

You returned to the scene of the crime - theirs -

for one reason only:

to protect the next  person,

to keep the next nineteen year old

from being swept up in a murderous search

even though he was not, had never been,  a murderer.

The only person you harmed was yourself,

by helping over and over until your  body refused. 

Maybe you shouldn’t have offered,

maybe we shouldn’t have asked,

no matter whose life it saved.

Maybe you should have said no and only no

until you could find a way,

to stay safe

from the terror they had injected into your body.

The Shot

It wasn’t fatal, I thought

having waited  an hour for the sound

with twenty-five rifled officers

bordering the plaza

under my  window -

marksmen poised,

as the negotiator

did his job.

The scene was secured.

What was the final need for the shot?

The shoot to kill shot?

The one quick crack in the air

shot, not

against foot , forearm, hand,

but the  gray,  black

blue shot, pop,

at the chest shot,

oozing  red. 

Sounds swirling, colors

whirling

as the siren red heat unfurled

and the last thing I saw was you

wailing, waving your pistol around your head.

Now, the weather has turned

and you

are  dead.

Through the Glass

-for a friend sentenced to death

Through the glass, through the court rooms,

the appeals, the legislature,

the birthdays remembered too late,

we have become friends.

How can this be explained to the Attorney General,

or the guard who brings you from the cell in chains?

A door is opening, a door that has been shut

since we met decades ago

exchanging names through the scratched plexiglass, sweating

in the same dirt encrusted booth where hundreds sweated before us.

A door is opening,

a crack through which you may now, at last,

be allowed to slip a drawing:

a cartoon animal, a potted plant,

sketched in the colored pencils you couldn’t have

during the years you were locked in the hole.

There have been years of living from execution dates set, to dates stayed.

“I was five days away twice,” you say.  I nod,

unable to speak.

The scope of this ascent from the dungeon

has opened a crack in my heart,

light coming through for the first time in twenty-seven years,

moving over dread, to the top bunk,

for the first time.

You sit in front of me, behind the glass,

ballcap high on your head.

You can leave the cell block three times a day,

and eat hot food.

You go to the canteen in the evenings and can’t stop eating.

Twice a week you go to the yard, no longer caged by yourself.

No trouble, no fights, you get along.

They don’t give you pencils, but when you draw

they don’t take them away. 

I have been given

a whole new life, you say.  And maybe the door of impossible,

the door of breathing, the door of relief, of maybe it can happen,

has happened, the door of maybe you will live

through this ocean of no chance and impossible,

through this boulder of fear,

has been rolled back one inch, just enough

to let you slide through in your baseball cap

and gray clothes.

On the other side of the scratched glass

I’m starting to breathe.

Maybe the water will go over the bridge and maybe

the drought will end.

Maybe the tree will grow out of the shade and maybe

you will grow old.  Maybe

the dust cloud will settle, maybe

the hummingbird will stop at your window

and maybe, this death by design

scheduled

will finally,

be taken off line.

Lao Rubert is a poet and advocate for criminal justice reform. She lives in North Carolina where she taught poetry in the Artists in the Schools program. Her poems have appeared in The Davidson Miscellany, Duke Archive, WTVD Program Guide, Raleigh News and Observer and NC Independent.