by: Juliet Kono
My son lives on the streets.
We don’t see each other much.
Like a mother who puts white lilies
on the headstone of a dead child,
I put money into his bank account,
clothes into E-Z Access storage
and pretend he’s far away—
at a boarding school, or in a foreign country.
Nights, I dream fairy tales about him.
I dream he becomes a prince,
scholar or warrior who rescues me
from sorrow, the way he rescued me
when he was a child and said,
“Mommy, don’t cry,” and brought tea
into the room of his father’s acrimony—
brave, standing tall in the forest
fire of his father’s scorn. I wake
to the empty sound of wind in the trees.
He says he wants to live with me.
I say I can’t live with him—
boy whose words crash like branches in a rain storm.
Nothing can hold him in,
the walls of a house too thin.
Back home, I had seen
the “study-hard-so-you-don’t-become-like-them”
street bums on Mamo Street,
and he’s like them.
These days, in order to catch a glimpse of him,
I circle the city. One day,
I see him on his bike.
People give him wide berth,
the same way birds avoid power lines,
oncoming cars or trees.
I park on a side street.
Wild-eyed, he flies the block
as if in a holding pattern.
Not of my body, not of my hopes,
he homes in on what can’t be given or taken away.
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A poem for tonight in anticipation of the benefit reading I've organized for the Warming Center and Room at the Inn, places that help the homeless in my area.
No matter how difficult I think my life is, I know that I am greatly blessed.
Saint Marty knows this.
