Chicago backpedal.
East Rogers Park,
back then back whenever,
2012 or so at a vague guess.
Blazing hot summer rays day, a
Lake Michigan non-destructive,
reflective skin tornado gallery.
Loyola Beach Park unhurried stroll.
Lazy roasting sizzling flesh mosaic:
bicycles, walkers, skaters, joggers,
sweaters, laughers, headphone-nodders,
cooked minds temperature-stunned,
hardly a noise to disturb the
humid drowsy throb and hum.
And then suddenly!
Young guy running past!
Town crier shouting the news!
“Somebody drowned down at the pier!”
An instant everybody-moving urgency,
trauma drama magnet energy, human
metal filings drawn towards maybe-death.
And I get caught up carried along,
can see down on the frowning horizon
two chunky trundling cop cars elbowing through
the horizon-muttering gathering pier crowd.
They jump out of the Chicago PD way,
Protect and Serve, bodyswerve
what you don’t know if you want to see,
epicenter runners slowing down
nearing awed impatient ground zero.
Excited scared fascinated air buzz whipping
voices carried on the heavy still wind.
Some sort of lifting device
parked ready and waiting to go
at the conspiratorial pier end
next to the lighthouse, whose day beam
didn’t stop this poor reveller foundering.
I stop fairly far away
don’t want to get too close,
shouldn’t even be watching
superstitious voyeur dread chills
stabbing at my crawling knowing spine.
Dizzy breaths held.
And then I see it!
Wince swallow shake head.
Young man coming into view,
looks to be around late teens,
slowly carefully electronically
hauled up by the tied hands
from the rocks-covered water area,
where an incautious shock joy jumper
could easily come a cropper
when tumbling into deceptively
shallow water, and life ending
instant fingersnap oblivion.
(There’s paint-faded diving warning signs
hieroglyphed along the pier concrete
if you squint and look hard enough)
Young black guy, light brown skin
clad only in white shorts,
wet body glistening in the beating sun,
head lolling back maybe dead don’t know.
Nobody knows anything,
but still the rumor-whispering
crowd somehow still knows all.
The first shocked confused thing
to go through my mind
is it looks like a lynching, or maybe
Eugene Williams suddenly somehow
resurrected from a watery grave
to die in a Lake Michigan rerun, found
concealed rocks for his own unaware head
under this heavy seen-it-all-before
shrugging Midwestern sky.
My skull spins and I look away,
walk away, but never far enough.
Later that night I look online
to see if I can find out what happened.
Tiny data story scrap tells me
he died later in Evanston Hospital.
That poor anonymous young man
whose name wasn’t mentioned.
He’s gone
but never
forgotten,
as the sorrowful historic
mournful banshee wail
of Billie Holliday
echoes down through the
since-elapsed but
somehow
near
years
forever.
THE END
(4/12/2025, 00:24 a.m.)
(Eugene Williams was a black 17-year-old who drifted into a segregated area of
Lake Michigan when swimming, who then drowned after being struck by rocks thrown
by a white man. His death kicked off a Chicago race riot that lasted for
several days and resulted in 38 deaths)
And the tragic, deeply poignant, horrible Billie Holiday song about lynchings that this poem is named after:
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