The Sentence
begins with its subject,
which is the sentence.
Track the sentence
to find out what happens
or how it will act. It is
the subject, after all. To track,
meaning keep an eye on,
which is synecdoche,
part representing the whole
of a thing. One
may track a package if he pleases.
One may track a person,
though you’d probably want
the whole of him, not only
an eye, or perhaps
only an eye. Look how
the sentence is so capable
of embracing contraction.
A him may function
as a subject, but that depends
upon the sentence, i.e., A man
is subject to his sentence.
You understand.
Such syntax renders it like
a package showing evidence
of having been tampered with—
Copyright © 2019 by Nathan McClain. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 23, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘The sentence’ was written on the heels of a longer sequence of poems I'd composed over the last year or so, all entitled ‘They Said I Was an Alternate,’ which interrogates facets of our seriously flawed criminal justice system through the lens of criminal trial and jury duty, though I'm sure my occupation as a teacher greatly informs the poem's approach. It was one of those gift poems that arrives nearly whole and requires little revision, which means the poem was difficult to trust. Anyone who knows me well knows I have long resisted writing overtly political poems, largely because, as a black poet, I felt it was somehow expected of me. And I much prefer to offer the unexpected, yet here we are.”
—Nathan McClain