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Robert Knox is a Boston Globe correspondent, a poet and fiction writer, and the author of a recently published novel based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, Suosso’s Lane. A resident of Quincy, Mass., Knox is a contributing editor for the online journal, Verse-Virtual. He lived in Somerville a long time ago, while attending graduate school at Boston University.

You Had to Be There

Robert Knox

When people like you were killed

having made the mistake of being born in the wrong place,

to the wrong people, doing poorly on their SATs

Even the winners, a chemistry major from Boston

dying forty-five years later when Agent Orange,

reports for duty: he was There

Or there, back then, in Central Park when the chanting stopped

No teargas, no riots, mere ceremonies of innocence

though later we get caught with a jay in the wrong place

by men with bulges on their belts and short haircuts

My girl sits on the evidence, our leader swallows the pill bag,

grunting answers, dulling the hunt for the hunters,

who shoe us off, fortunate white kids, to be there somewhere else

still Manhattan though, mid-town, then uptown

to a birthday party at the Statue of Alice

All of us still in Wonderland, milling on the town green

The National Guard showing up in fancy dress, four dead, white kids too,

but there in the wrong place when the unpredictable electrons

of a chance-driven universe coalesced into high-pressured lead

Black kids too, there in Mississippi, somehow tokened out of the story line

No longer to be anywhere//  ever again//  just like that.

But you had to be there,

that was the whole point, we were counting on you

Being anywhere else was irrelevant, virtually non-being

Here? No longer any good, time’s dustbin, moldering color snaps

you clean from the basement when the old folks pass,

glean a few, mostly dispose

You had to be there//  to understand

When the workers take down the show, roll up the maps,

dethrone the prints

from the wall, wipe the dust from the tapestries

To know what was real beyond love and regrets,

and to laugh in the right places,

you had to Be There

— Robert Knox