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