Yet! 'What about your religious beliefs? ' Why do you think I am wading, In the middle of this pool? That should answer your question, And remove any doubt you have. But I have not determined, The best way to walk ON it. Where they pretended to wade, Singing that old blood-deep song. Why are you standing in the middle of that pool? To prove, What? ' Oh, I can wade IN the water. I am not one to profess to walk on water. What is the purpose? What is your intent? ' I may consider running for public office. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory some. Smith boldly ties Americas contemporary moment both to our nations fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. According to oral lore, Harriet Tubman used the song Wade in the Water to communicate strategy to slaves traveling the Underground Railroad: its coded language alerted freedom seekers that bounty hunters were on their trail with bloodhounds and that they should jump into the river so that the dogs couldn’t track their scent. Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.

I sacrificed my own life to be at their side. Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean. I have had military experience, To prove I am patriotic. I don't want to seem confused about the issue. Some poems inhabit a more boldly theological space than does previous work, yet Smiths sense of the numinous stays appealingly.

I can't think of anyone, Who has experimented sexually. I wouldn't and couldn't touch that mess, Today. And I smoked more weed, Than I believed could be grown.

Wade in the water poems