Belief in the
existence of other human beings as such is love.
Yellow
tape runs between
poles at the Kāne'ohe
bus stop where a
homeless woman has set up beside her shopping cart. (In
future, shopping carts shall come with locks to prevent their
wandering.) A man lives in the front seat of a pickup
truck on Lulani Drive; his
bumper sticker reads “Hawaiian: Nuff Said.”
He poked holes in the black plastic curtains to let air in. A
white man with a white beard sits on the ledge beside Macy's in
Kailua, and while I see his eyes, I can project nothing into them.
Existence is a narrow space, one so easily fallen from. It's cot, or
stretcher, safety's barest minimum. A cell comes with bars, as does a crib.
2 comments:
Nice! I love the people populating this poem - they feel very real with just a few words. Small thoughts: the parenthetical musing pulls me out, and really it's not in the future - carts are getting locked up now, so maybe get rid of the parenthesis and change "In future" to "Now." Last line feels disconnected. I do love the line before it about the cot/stretcher.
I agree with Karen about the real people, which brings me back to that lovely starting line by SW--belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love. I had thought, but belief in the existence of other human beings could be fear--and then got to the idea that seeing human beings as human beings, real & themselves, is love. So the poem enacts the idea. "Safety's barest minimum" then is just not enough. The future shopping carts have locks, but no food.
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