How Well Do You Hear?

 How Well Do You Hear?

(“For the Lord hears the needy and does not despise his own who are in bonds.” Psalm 69:33)

Stand on the hills that rise steeply
above the river.
Listen to the silence of its wide and winding traverse.
There is a universe you cannot see when you
stand so high above everybody.
Descend, take your time, end at sea level where

The bridge

Shelters a dozen and a half humans shivering
under its girders and steel.

Now choose what you view.

Do you breathe the mildewed air,
do you leave your boots strung from a tree limb
and hope they will dry by morning?
Do you hide when the flashlights intrude on
your children without warning?
Do you eat slowly to make it last,
or quickly before it is gone?

Sometimes the sirens sound for one who wandered
too close to the edge. Sometimes we want to exchange them
like batteries on their last legs. Sometimes they live forgotten
just beyond the reach of our consciousness.

And yet

They huddle closer on the slippery rocks under

The bridge.

While we tear down their tents and cities and hope they will
vagabond elsewhere.

How well do you hear, o follower of the One
who had no place to lay his head? How well
do you sleep while they smoke nervous cigarettes
because the night, the rain, the hunger, the pain
keep them up dreamless. One of them

Found a discarded couch, yellow and old,
and claimed it for a day.