American Life in Poetry

Sun., June 14, 2015

Ted Kooser U.S. poet laureate, 2004-06

I once knew an artist who seemed to live on those little envelopes of free sugar that one can find on tables in restaurants. And he took the little “watercolor pans” of jelly, too, stuffing his pockets. Here’s a poem by Ned Balbo, who lives in Baltimore, about another sugar snatcher.

The Sugar Thief

If it was free, you taught, I ought to grab it as you did: McDonald’s napkins, pens, and from the school where you were once employed

as one of two night shift custodians,

the metal imitation wood wastebasket

still under my desk. But it was sugar that you took most often as, annoyed on leaving Dunkin’ Donuts, pancake house, and countless diners, I felt implicated

in your pleasure, crime, and poverty.

I have them still, your Ziploc bags of plunder, yet I find today, among the loose change in my pockets, packets crushed or faded— more proof of your lasting legacy.

Poem copyright 2010 by Ned Balbo, from “The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems” (Story Line Press, 2010), and reprinted by permission of Ned Balbo and the publisher. American Life in Poetry is supported by the Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.