Photo by Declan Sun on Unsplash. Image description: the underside of a city highway overpass. Some of the overpass pillars have climbing vines. City building in background.
The lines for bread
stretched far beyond
the church's open doors
A beggar greeted me,
pulling his unwashed shirt,
as he talked, eyes down.
I expected he would ask
for help or ready cash,
but he had other news
to share that did not
need the grudging coins
out of the purse of my heart.
like the brokenhearted
we might lift from ashes --
perhaps another day.
He had chosen to live
to be poor among the poor
with cast-off clothes and food,
protected by the addicts, drunks,
with tangled minds in agony --
what some would call insane.
Beneath old bridges, under
tarps with treasured bundles
pushed in rusting carts.
The soft words that he spoke
copied where the homeless,
hungry, hurried along sheltered
near the looming monuments
where the middle class boasted
that there was no poverty,
no misfits on the all-night
buses, in the clinic lobbies,
bound for unmarked graves,
abandoned like the children
by those the prophets said
"eat my people as if eating bread."
The poor, in endless search,
are still a presence telling us
soul and body are no different.
Even without visible wounds
on his hands, his arms clearly
ready to embrace me and give
me his own bread to take and eat.
