Sun Poem: Death on a Bicycle

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Death on a Bicycle

If you train on a road bike during the boiling hot summer in Nakajo, Japan,
Your most valuable equipment, more than gloves
Helmet or spare tire,
Is sunglasses.

There are gnats.

As you breeze beside the rice paddies and through the mountain forests,
They stick to your eyes.

When you zoom down the gorge at Tainai,
So fast that spit escapes from your mouth to crawl up your cheek
                   like a living blob,
Gnats stick to your spit and sweat
And lodge in your eyes
Where they die.

You can shower off the dirt,
Scrub clean the toothy grin tattooed on your leg by the bicycle chain,
But when you step from the bathtub, feeling pure as dawn,
You look in the mirror and see
Dead bodies still stuck in your eyes.

Little black dots,
Premonitions of death:
Someday your entire eyes will be nothing
But black.

So you buy sunglasses,
The wrap-around kind that shield on all angles,
And fool yourself that you are avoiding death
On a bicycle.

But you can’t avoid death on a bicycle.
And in your race for vitality
You promote the very thing you abhor:
A frog goes pop! under the tire.
A blue-and-black butterfly
Zigzagging haphazardly
Meets the brutal blender of your spokes
Its wings crunching softly
Like a cookie in your mouth.

Well, when you die

We’ll cremate your body,
Take the ashes to the bridge spanning the Tainai Gorge –
The bridge you shot over so many sun-spangled dawns,
The mist stretched above the stream like a sleeping serpent –
And fling your ashes
Down into the water
To be scrutinized by the fish
For a moment
Then forgotten.

Then we’ll walk back to our sensible cars,

With the wrap-around

                                                                Windshields

Our heads

                                              Parting

          the clouds of

gnats

                                                                                  Remembering

                   You

                                              and your

Cycle.

– Bruce Ballard

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I wrote this poem when I was living in Japan, and entered it in a poetry contest where I won first place.

A few years later, when I was applying for a job at the Bronx Charter School for Better Learning, I had to teach a demonstration lesson on poetry to a class of 2nd Graders, and their teacher, who was in the room at the time, encouraged me to use this poem for the lesson.

I was surprised to find that the kids responded enthusiastically to my work. I drew on the blackboard a picture of the mountains I rode my bike on, the Tainai Gorge, the bridge, etc. At the end of the lesson their teacher and I encouraged the students to pick their favorite part of the poem, copy the words at the bottom of a sheet of paper, and draw a picture of the scene on the top of the paper. I came home with some delightful drawings showing me on a bicycle, frogs jumping everywhere, my blackened eyes, etc.

We included this poem in a huge anthology of poetry that we put together to use in the following years. It includes poems by established poets (Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, etc.) as well as poems that our students wrote. To see examples of the student poetry, click here and here.

Then one day a teacher in the 3rd Grade had her children study my poem, and one student, Janiya, on her own wrote a response poem. Here it is – and it’s also now included in the school’s official anthology.

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Froggy

If you ever
see a frog and
you’re                                  
on                           
a                  
bike take a
stick and move it away.
Don’t just                                    
ride
                                             on it and pop it
like a pimple.  Only if you
want to see blood all over
the place.  Be a very good
person and just take it up.  Do you
know frogs have to live, too?

– Janiya, 3^rd Grade