poverty begets anonymity
there is a hole in our rusty trampoline,
which would not pass any safety measures should it be tested,
there is no ladder, and no net.
still,
my brothers are in the air and telling me about important things that are not important,
like Fortnite dances, video games, and YouTube streams. And I am listening,
and we are smiling.
This is pindrops of love in the center
of the yard that we haven’t mowed since before last Christmas
and the dandelions are blossoming up to my knees.
i think about how there is something about the wildness of dandelions,
the preservation and perseverance of what is not preferred by many.
how we will never get rid of all that yellow optimism.
i have always called dandelions my favorite flower.
because when you grow up from nothing,
you are used to being mistaken as a weed.
i think this is why my mother started to dye her hair,
as though to create a rose from thin air,
as though to say to the universe: “I deserve to be here,”
as though she needed others to see it
to believe it herself.
(this is the secret reason i have always hated roses, too.
I have never found love in tired platitudes.)
whenever I think of my mother, I hear
the greatest of all our secret fears:
what is love
left untranslated?
At first, I think of grubby baby fingers,
Of knowing a need and letting it be,
Existing, but
(without that effervescent, ecclesiastic You)
only mediocrely. Socks perpetually without shoes.
Being unseen, unheard, or not believed—
As though another human being stole what made you breathe and
Lost it somewhere. A life-long misunderstanding
A purple bruise flowers across all of you,
As you sleep on the bed of potential.
proverbial “better things” hang like fruit off
trees that were always too high to reach,
blanketed by a sky of circumstance and clouded fickle luck,
for we know now:
luck was not always set aside for the best of us.
these are the lessons my mother taught me.
this is what my brothers taught me.
the poor are rich in knowing who they are
and what they need—
the rest of us are just pretending.
poverty begets anonymity
I realize this in the ruddy church building where
a former Union employee uses wrinkled hands to pray over me,
where under lines and the fine print of being
there are whole people whose whole bodies point to the system that failed
and the men that put them there, deliberately
sometimes, we are immune to how often the signs point back into our psyches.
he asks me to remember always: God is Almighty.
And there is Haggar—
Disheveled, discarded, and dismayed.
Who first called God “El Roi,”
Who recognized her need and realized she was more seen
than anybody. Desert-dwelling, with her newborn half-mistake of a baby
she fell on her knees to worship a being much larger than she—
A precursor to Job’s suffering. To all the wisdom in Ecclesiastes.
she heard the voice of eternal prosperity—
poverty begets anonymity,
& through given suffering
we see the silhouette of the God who promised everything:
who makes Israels out of Ishmaels, deliberately.
& we are still jumping on this rusty, holy,
unsafe trampoline,
& I know my mother’s house will never be clean,
that our life will never look like pristine, like a magazine.
and we are going to talk about important things that are not important,
because for some reason, that is integral to humanity.
i know that love looks like turned ears, open hands, and running feet.
i know that love—
That is, being seen—
is what cuts through otherwise translated things.
I am thinking about how the sky is, technically, blue everywhere
and how there are still clouds, technically, everywhere,
and you don’t get to choose what sky you get
and how the morning doesn’t care how you got there—
it just is. & changes, just like that.
I am a lot smaller than I seem.
but i am rich in being seen
there is a yellow hope blossoming across those who go
like me
it reminds me of dandelion seeds—
of wishing on something. Of summer, of spring.
of becoming of nothing
Of the humble hidden simple beauty
in the honest broken thing.
