MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY POEM

	January 20, 2003
	Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky shares a poem about a young man's experience with racism.

Sometimes a poem compresses something large into its most direct, plain and minimal essence. Countee Cullen wrote a twelve-line poem that does something like that for the racial hatred Martin Luther King Jr. resisted, the social and psychological penetration of racism. Here is Countee Cullen's poem, written in 1925: INCIDENT (for Eric Walrond) Once riding in old Baltimore, Hear-filled, head-filled with glee, I saw a Baltimorean Keep looking straight at me. Now I was eight and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out His tongue, and called me, "Nigger." I saw the whole of Baltimore From May until December; Of all the things that happened there That's all that I remember.