What I Didn'T Know When I Met Langston Hughes Poem by Iris ArensonFuller

Before I truly knew all living things were kin
or that there was a larger menu of sexual preferences
than was served up in my family’s small vinyl papered
kitchen with the orioles and jays staring at my soup

Before I heard the first ugly name on my father’s lips
after the neighbors scurried like tattling roaches
when they saw me riding in a rusted old car
with six boys and I cried hard from the stinging words,
a blue bruise painted in a bad dream by
Smokin Joe Frazier’s powerful fist

Before I knew about toddlers in the ER at St. Vincent’s
whose limbs were mistaken for bacon strips and
burned in frying pans in kitchens where they should
have been eating freshly baked cookies

Before I ever heard of Matthew Shepard, alone,
shivering in the cold, beaten, tied to a fence,
whispering why into the brutal Wyoming wind

Before I heard of napalm burns or Gulf War Syndrome,
of veterans who believed in their country, fighting
demons under city bridges, talking to themselves

Before I grew up and out of a life that was bright and
textured like velvet, the nap never stroked in the wrong
direction but wrapped around me, warming me with
promises of poetry and young love

Before my cave sanctuary turned into darkness where
I sat carving sad pictures of too many lost loved ones
or where I lay drenched in high-fevered sweats
unable to see a world that would be all right again

Before all of that I stood up, left foot asleep, limping across
a high school auditorium, pleated skirt, crisp white blouse,
high heels, ears with hoop earrings listening to loud claps,
tongues clucking with sincere pity for the pretty girl
they thought was crippled and about to receive a poetry
award from Mr. Langston Hughes

Before that, I was pre-me and thought him merely
a rambling old man who foretold great joy and suffering,
extracting a shy promise that I would not stop writing
even if the pain of life took hold of my throat and choked me
Four years later, he was dead and I still didn’t know
what I didn’t know when I met Langston Hughes.