Anthony Walton

Anthony Walton Poems

Anthony Walton Biography

Anthony Walton (born 1960) is an American poet and writer. He is perhaps best known as the author of a chapbook of poems, Cricket Weather and for his non-fiction work Mississippi: An American Journey. His work has appeared widely in magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, and Rainbow Darkness. He is currently a professor and the writer-in-residence at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Walton grew up in Aurora, Illinois. He studied at the University of Notre Dame and received an M.F.A. from Brown University.)

The Best Poem Of Anthony Walton

The Lovesong Of Emmett Till (1996)

More than likely she was Irish
or Italian, a sweet child who knew him
only as a shy clown.
Colleen, Jenny or Marie, she
probably didn't even know
he had her picture,
that he had traded her cousin
for baseball cards or a pocketknife,
that her routine visage
sat smoldering in his wallet
beyond any price.
He carried his love
like a burden, and devotion
always has to tell.
Hell, he was just flirting
with that lady in the store,
he already had his white
woman back up in Chicago.
He wasn't greedy, just showing
off, showing the rustics
how it was done. He had an eye,
all right, and he was free
with it, he knew they loved it.
Hey baby, was all he said,
and he meant it as a compliment,
when he said it in Chicago
the white girls laughed.
So when they came to get
him, he thought it was
a joke, he proclaimed himself guilty
of love, he showed them
the picture and paid the price of
not innocence, but affection, affection
for a little black-haired, blue-eyed
girl who must by now be an older
woman in Chicago, a woman
who will never know
she was to die for, that he died
refusing to take back her name,
his right to claim he loved her.

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