Gwendolyn Brooks

"The Boy Died in My Alley"

This poem consists of eight stanzas of varying lengths. The poet describes how she was visited and interrogated by police after a boy was found dead in her alley.  The policeman asks the speaker, "'You heard a shot?'" and she replies "Shots I hear and Shots I hear. / I never see the dead (lines4-6).  The speaker has become accustomed to the sound of gunshots at night.  When asked is she knew the boy, the speaker replies that "I have known this Boy before, who / ornaments my alley" (lines 18-19).  She explains that she "always heard him deal with death" (line 22) but the speaker has "closed my heart-ears late and early. / And I have killed him ever" (lines 24 - 25).  At this point, the reader realizes that the speaker may not have known the dead boy personally but that the boy has become a casualty in a place where men are often killed in the streets.  The speaker feels personally responsible for the death because she has done nothing to stop it and has turned a blind eye or "closed my heart-ears" in deliberate ignorance of the atrocities of the streets. I once read this poem in a UIL poetry reading competition about 11 years ago! I was 16! I think I would be able to present a more convincing reading of this poem now that I have gained some maturity.  While the themes addressed by this poem invoked sympathy in me and inspired me, the judges weren't convinced that a 16 year-old white boy from Levelland, Texas really understood the suffering of people who witness violent crime in the ghetto every week or every day of their lives.