Locomotion

by Jacqueline Woodson

  they wake you up

  and make you write them down real fast even though

  there’s not a voice saying Be quiet, Lonnie in your head

  anymore

  Just words.

  Lots and lots and lots of words and

  this sunny day already making itself into a poem

  about your beautiful sister, Lili

  skipping beside you in her yellow dress

  Smiling ’cause you finally finished reading the Bible

  she gave you

  the Bible she thinks is the reason you two

  are here now

  together

  You let her go on thinking that

  ’cause she’s just a little kid

  and you’re her big brother, Locomotion

  who’d do anything

  to keep her smiling.

  I told you. I told you, she keeps saying.

  This day is already putting all kinds of words

  in your head

  and breaking them up into lines

  and making the lines into pictures in your mind

  And in the pictures the people are

  laughing and frowning and

  eating and reading and

  playing ball and skipping along and

  spinning themselves into poetry.

  And I was right, Lili says, looking up at me. Wasn’t I?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks so much to Juliet Widoff, Nancy Paulsen, Kimiko Hahn, Reiko Hahn-Hannan, and Toshi Reagon for—among other things—reading this.

  And a huge shout-out of thanks to all of my friends who are poets, especially Meg Kearney, who helped me enormously with line breaks and forms and whose kind words made me believe, all over again, in the power of poetry.