I saw him picking beer cans off the street -
A thin hard harvest - famine-hungry for flat aluminum
And other stuff to sell for mean junk-yard nickels.
And take his daughter to McDonalds,
If he ever had enough. He didn't.
A memory is all she has of his tired bent intentions.
The white wool of the worn years
Clung 'round his scruffy neck
Like dried out moss on a dying tree.
Too old for this second crop of children
Growing up from his troubled roots.
Three generations struggling in a single spot of space
Colliding in a narrow door of time
There was no place for him except the floor
And there in desperate heat of this July
He lay down one night and died.
His heart like some old unbalanced clock
stopped dead and never moved again.
Run over like the cans beneath the pick-up truck,
In early years. Too many stuck within his hand
Before they emptied down his throat
And hit the street or it hit him.
Cigarettes as well and uncertain food
Helping out to do him in.
Poor man! Not nice poor
Sweet as Francis with a bird of broken wing. But the poor - a pain sometimes
- bleak and blamed
By all, but the Saviour, in the end.
By the children too. They were chanced easily into life
Without a notion of the stakes
And the block of time it takes
To bring them to their prime.
Yet Jesus spoke of sparrows falling down
How sure they are of help upon the ground.
But will flattened cans ever open
Into cups of common good,
And reason cease to question why they should?
Still, hope staggers from the gutters to insure
That God has not been able to ignore
The ever blessed brotherof the poor.