The Runt
(for R.F.K.)

You were the smallest brother of the three
- the one your father called The Runt
- your teeth a tad bucked you were
small next to your broadshouldered brothers John and Ted
running your hand through your hair
a shy determined sweat in a suit and tie
at the deep south summer country town campaigning
eyes like bleached Levis slant down on the edge of the shot

We drank the truth, heard it tumble from your mouth
through opiated lies and paralysed hands,
rattlesnake poison you saw and named,
cut and sucked and spat out.
(You never hear that kind of dangerous talk now Bobby
- nowadays they bind the poison in.)

You named the slow ‘violence of institutions;
indifference and inaction and slow decay.’
Poisons ‘because their skin has different colors.’
and ‘the slow destruction of a child by hunger
This is the breaking of a man's spirit…
And this too afflicts us all.’

Meanwhile ‘Please pay to the order of/ to the order of’
Sirhan Sirhan wrote in his diary (or so they claimed).
‘My determination to eliminate R. F. K./ is becoming
more the more [sic]/ of an unshakable obsession …
‘Please pay to the order of/
to the order of’

‘…look for scapegoats… for conspiracies …
this sickness from our soul’

LA 12.15 am
5 June 1968

Having just won the California Democratic Primary
your words a banner in the wind from a fire rising
poetry for tongues stapled to silence
past John’s assassination
even King’s
a new rush of hope
then

in the food service pantry
of the Ambassador Hotel
an El Greco comes to life
falling bodies and blooming blood

Five shot yet somehow all survived
but Bobby …

In your ruddy pelt a gunpowder scatter
your jacket hole-punched
Young bellboy kneels cradles your head,
rosaries your hand …
Your pooling halo draws the flash bulbs
pop pop pop echo of gunshots but
you’re at absolute peace now Bobby
though the world
writhes around you

Who will guard us from the guardians?
And did they take Marilyn too?
And the evidence, that too?

And where did your words fly Bobby,
out of the hole of the blasted public throat?
Did they fly south for the endless winter of our bloody discontent,
this terrible quickening we face now without you?
I am ashamed and furious – where
did your words fly Bobby?


Robert F. Kennedy’s speech ‘On the Mindless Menace of Violence’ was delivered April 5, 1968, at the City Club of Cleveland, Ohio, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, and a year and a half after his elder brother, President John F Kennedy was shot in office. Exactly two months later he himself was assassinated. Words in italics are quoted fragments of this speech.