03 Aug Herring Run by Scott W. Williams
adapted from a quote of Zhuang Zhou
Laying the bike on the bank,
the boy walked in the puddles muddied
by the stream in Gamblers Woods.
At thirteen years, imagining
He is a frog, leaping from stone to stone.
Jumping was limited here.
So as a fish he walked-splashed-swam
down the stream…and…slipped and fell.
Looking up into the sky.
He is a hawk floating amongst low clouds
looking down below at a dreaming Black boy
amidst the thinning trees
lying in the mud…
scaring food.
About the Poet
Scott W. Williams is professor emeritus of Mathematics at the University at Buffalo, where he was awarded the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and created the Mathematicians of the African Diaspora and African American History of Western New York websites. He has lectured on mathematics on four continents and was a Fulbright Lecturer in Prague (then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic) in 1986-1987.
As a writer, he is the author of the poetry collection Bonvibre Haiku (CWP Press, 2017) and the micro-fiction collection Natural Shrinkage (Destitute Press, 2018). He also the editor of the four volume A Flash of Dark: An Afro-Futurist Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Poetry series published by Writer’s Den Press. His poetry, fiction, and prose have appeared in over fifty literary magazine and journals.
This poem appears in Scott’s new collection Gamblers Woods: Poetry from Baltimore’s Wilson Park published earlier this year by Moonstone Press. The poems in the book are set in Wilson Park, an African-American neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, where Williams was raised in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, before attending Morgan State University.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.