And Indians

By Glyn Maxwell b. 1962 Glyn Maxwell

They made a word for light when it went out,

Then many words for dark, if not such dark

As fell and spread among them like a doubt.

It’s not a date we celebrate, but then

There’s no one day to ring or week to mark.

It happened and keeps happening to them.

Nothing to make a song or dance about.

Nothing to be the theme of a third act.

They had no argument and show no sign

Of coming back to make one. They were them,

And death is in that word like its own wine

Gone acid and eroding them to then.

Then to the fled allotment of a time.

Then to the listed ruin of a fact.

Source: The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990-1995 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000)

Biography

Born in England to Welsh parents, Glyn Maxwell was educated at Oxford University and Boston University, where he studied both poetry and theater with Derek Walcott. This simultaneous training in two disciplines has enabled him to create innovative work across genres. Maxwell has written numerous verse plays as well as long narrative poems. The Sugar Mile (2005), a verse narrative set in a Manhattan bar a few days before . . .

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