Poverty & War
For Maj, Tommy, Lilah., the gypsy-traveler hearts, & those who have made me a worthy guest in their home.
They remember when I was homeless
is what I say to my neighbor
about the coffee shop boys who don’t.
For one year
I catch-phrased ‘couch surfer’
with its own poem, Genuine
Kindness.
I fed homeless men a year later.
I found dogs on streets and took them home.
I repaid the restaurants from where I dined and dashed.
My own long red apron spelled in a new alphabet ‘they might not remember me’
with a blush kiss.
I never did pay the bartender back.
The one who may have deserved it most.
He once let me in with boxes
while his roommate let me out with the word cunt.
With his tongue he slaughtered the kindness in himself.
The two hundred still sits in a treasure box by a book lost and forgone.
These ghosts are my penance.
I tell the same neighbor; everyone is connected. There’s not a name I’m not haunted by.
It reminds me of this one poem, exchanging these words.
Replaced by Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘Kindness’, a quilt of unnamed shapes.
In travelling the bus all winter
Kindness writes: ‘How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop.’
When the bus does finally stop, it is those who share ‘maize’ and ‘pollo’
in a similar language of acceptance. Then kindness enters.
Stripped down to a diaper,
a toddler stares at dirt, cups it in his hands and says:
Want some?
He is offering you nothing that you want.
Everything below your high head held on a braid of
that couch surfing is wanting to reject the offering.
A small token, at least some grass or a dandelion, something you might want a little,
anything with value would be a worthier cause.
Instead, you say thank you with a tiny bow.
The coffee shop men didn’t know what to say those days except,
We got this one.
They don’t know what they’re looking at anymore when you say now;
Thank you for the dirt. The ground. A toddler offering the only token they know.
For exchanging, homeless for couch surfer.
It’s our own secret, brevity.
The over-tip with nothing in return.
The ways language can bridge flourishing and peace instead of poverty and war.
Cover photo by Bernadetta Watts
