A poem about Sing Sing Prison

For about a decade and a half, I have been teaching at Sing Sing Prison, a maximum-security facility in Ossining, New York. As one enters the prison, one is searched and must walk through a metal detector. Then, after about half and hour wait, one is taken to the school. In the hallways, there is a perpetual feeling of tension, but it dissipates very quickly as class begins. The students are among the most engaged that one is likely to find anywhere in the world. Any pause in a lecture is filled with questions, and there are never any of the awkward silences that are the bane of conventional undergraduate programs.

And yet, a writer by vocation, I have felt little urge to record the experience in print. Part of the reason is a pragmatic one ─ the possibility of legal complications. But there is also a concern that to write about the experience might mean to exploit it. Perhaps all that comes down to a feeling that these days, where cameras are everywhere and the internet is ubiquitous, some things should be left to direct experience.

But, one experience that has stayed with me is, on the very first day I was to teach, looking up and seeing the strands of barbed wire glittering over the fence. The sight has haunted me for years, and this week I wrote a poem about it, which I feel called to share:

SING SING PRISON AT NIGHT

Luxurious stems of gleaming steel
Wind up and loop around the top and sides of walls,
Like vines circling the boughs of trees.

The metal gleaming in the starlight,
Is beautiful, yet it should not be so.
Such loveliness could temp a prisoner

To ascend till he was shot, and fell
To leave a drop of blood suspended from a point. . .

A Christmas berry on a holly branch.

Perhaps some things are best left not quite silent, yet barely said.


The Raven and the Sun: Poems and Stories