Verse
Christman, Berniece Bunn & Miller, James A. & Petrie, Paul
James A. Miller Memoriam, Jesse Owens We are all, somehow, lesser for it. The slow run moving from the blistering pace . . . till world was record; its fastest human. Singlyif but by...
...Like cunning wrestlers they use our strength against us...
...Singlyif but by seconds (quaternary time)-he slowed the mad rush of an idea in which he, and life, had no place...
...a lostness among my pillow's careless feathers...
...cities of the Americas...
...I'm, hanging yet to bed's soft crags, and shove my feet at shoes unlearned in how to scavenge for another music...
...Hamburg...
...His going now stills his speaking...
...The one he, part of, could no more leave than could others, to date, wish destruction...
...John Robbins-lumbering express who always ran downhillpleads: "Men of Sparta, the Athenians beseech you to hasten to their aid, and not allow that state, which is the most ancient in all Greece, to be enslaved by the barbarians...
...As soon as our eyes crossed yours, the race was done- though we spurted sidewise, zigzagged, darted and stopped, or opened our lungs and ran till the thud of our hearts drowned the thud of our pounding feet on the close-packed gravel, and the fences swam, onlookers disappeared, and the blue sky gathered and burst...
...He symbolized the race...
...living, we knew his face: history could (and thus we less alone) have a human one . . . We leave, that is, unable still from Marathon to hear him out: "Rejoice, we conquer...
...Pheidippides, "by birth an Athenian, and by profession and practice a trained runner," almost without knowing Paul Petrie The Runners Mitchell Salheeny-swift as a scythe's blade-dead...
...in no small part, with him...
...Before we slow ones have even rounded the turn you have broken the tape, and kneel in the long blue shadows catching your breath, though still we hear you behind us-thundering feet, hot bream on our necks, your arms outstretched for the tag-as if you were still here racing, your speed in the steps of the wind...
...Unable yet to redefine the cleft, the quarter-note or arpeggio of smoke still climbing warm above my lulled roof...
...here racing, your speed in the steps of the wind...
...What fear you struck in our hearts- on the playground playing tag-invincible runners...
...I hear the reconstructed rhythm of your day begin as you jog through flaps of street shadow regathering from the shaded banks of houses your own lost symphony...
...even the batest renegade of every umber would grant Berniece Bunn Christman Early Morning logger him that: he sped before the eye of their death and gained some reprieve, some fashion of second start for the race now no more confined to a cinder sprint in a corner of Berlin-but the thoroughfare connecting Delhi and Moscow and Peking and Buenos Aires...
...A block away your morning feet are dropping echoes across some tinged path in a park...
...Billy McKendricks-who swooped like a falcon, quick-long dead...
...Those three dark women sit in their patience and weave...
Vol. 108 • February 1981 • No. 4
