Wakefield, One Week After the Results

November 17, 2016

The world becomes violent

And senseless

As we are all taken aback

By news we cannot grip

And already the people are saying

Get over it

And even the well-meaning

Turn to platitudes

About solace in nature

The practice of self care

And visualizing love and peace

So we can heal and move forward

But I think of my students at Wakefield

My young south-side city-dwellers

The brown dreamers whose parents might be deported now

The ones who might never see an expanse

That isn't broken by roads

Or dotted by concrete benches

Crowned with the rumpled sleeping bodies

Of a transient tribe of humans in need

Instead of fields blanketed in grass

Or trees festooned with leaves

I think of the invisible privilege

Of those of us who can drive our cars

Out to the forest

Or walk to a park

Or even stay home

To tend an entire community of living things

Right there in our own back yards

But then I go back to the memory of my students

And I wonder

How they will fare

In their little brown bodies

In their little brown apartments

Next to the graffitied gray river

Covered in concrete and abandoned shopping carts

As it flows dryly

Past the giant empty shell

Of their shuttered school

And my mouth becomes

A dirt lot

On the southside 

Also poor and brown

With nothing left to safely say