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OMAR MIRANDA on
Gwendolyn Brooks The Boy Died in My Alley to Running Boy The Boy died in my alley without my Having Known. Policeman said, next morning, "Apparently died Alone." "You heard a shot?" Policeman said. Shots I hear and Shots I hear. I never see the Dead. The Shot that killed him yes I heard as I heard the Thousand shots before; careening tinnily down the nights across my years and arteries. Policeman pounded on my door. "Who is it?" "POLICE!" Policeman yelled. "A Boy was dying in your alley. A Boy is dead, and in your alley. And have you known this Boy before?" I have known this Boy before. I have known this boy before, who ornaments my alley. I never saw his face at all. I never saw his futurefall. But I have known this Boy. I have always heard him deal with death. I have always heard the shout, the volley. I have closed my heart-ears late and early. And I have killed him ever. I joined the Wild and killed him with knowledgeable unknowing. I saw where he was going. I saw him Crossed. And seeing, I did not take him down. He cried not only "Father!" but "Mother! Sister! Brother." The cry climbed up the alley. It went up to the wind. It hung upon the heaven for a long stretch-strain of Moment. The red floor of my alley is a special speech to me. |
Dr. Omar F. Miranda specializes in the literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. He is the editor of On the 200th Anniversary of Lord Byron's Manfred: Commemorative Essays, a Romantic Circles Praxis volume dedicated to Byron's poetic drama, co-editor of a forthcoming Cambridge volume, Percy Shelley for Our Times, and editor of an abridged teaching edition of Mary Shelley’s novel, The Last Man (Romantic Circles). He has published or forthcoming essays in European Romantic Review, Symbiosis, Keats-Shelley Journal, Romantic Circles, Studies in Romanticism, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, and The Wordsworth Circle; book chapters in Byron in Context (Cambridge UP), The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel; and book reviews in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, BARS Bulletin, and Review 19. He is currently working on a book manuscript, which tracks the origins and rise of the culture of global celebrity in the Romantic period (1750-1850).
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