Ted Littleford
I once saw a bank being robbed but didn’t know it
It was a normal afternoon, August, in the middle of the day
On the corner of Seventy-second street and Broadway
Maybe for that busy intersection it was a little quiet, an eerie sound
There was also a man in a white shirt on the ground.
This after all was New York in the 1970s
There was almost always someone on the ground, you see
You just meandered around, you barely take a look
You continue on your errand, for candy, cigs or a book
Anyway someone else was kneeling and helping out
And I returned this time by the same route
I saw a man on the very same corner by the fallen guy
His back to him, folding up an umbrella or a collapsing chair
I looked at him and he at me, a quick glancing stare
And that was it, in August, the dog days, I was young
Thinking of girls, not why there might be a shotgun
Being folded up by that man at the stock
Before he slid into a racing car that stopped
Suddenly at the corner and then sped off
That’s how I told the story later to the FBI
When they unbagged the weapon for me to identify
Alas, I couldn’t be sure ‚and who knew the white-shirted man
Was not an overdose or a drunk but a guard who’d been shot
A crime is a funny thing the way it unfolds and is not
What you think, it’s something you can wander through, a thing
That feels, quotidian, maybe with a little extra ping
Back then I at least insisted on reporting, there was someone to call
But here, now, in the midst of this thrall
Of death, of negligence, of so many lying gasping on their sheets
Are we finally sure now of what we see
All the little things that add up to the crime of the century
That has us all, slowly, by the throat
And is now squeezing to death even our vote
To the virus that’s now in the air
There’s such a new dose of despair
To whom do we report such a toxic mix
That now even an election may not do the trick?
There are so many bodies lying on the ground
It seems another normal day with an eerie sound.