Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
learn moreHenry Porter wore good clothes for his Journey,
the best his wife could make from leftover cambric,
shoes stolen from the master. They bit his feet,
but if he took them off he feared he’d never get them on again.
He needed to look like a free man when he got there.
Still in a box in the jostling heat, nostrils to a board pried to a vent,
(a peephole, too, he’d hoped, but there was only black to see)
there was nothing to do but sleep and dream and weep.
Sometime the dreams were frantic, frantic loneliness an acid in his heart.
Freedom was near but unimaginable.
