Looking at Life through Roseland-Colored Glasses
I was told not to visit my home town.
I would not be safe.
Might even be shot
in this city on the south side of Chicago.
Fifty years after attending Langston Hughes Elementary,
my school’s three-storied brick building still stands,
but windows are boarded up and the penny-candy store
across the street gone.
Were I assigned a white page like Langston
in “Theme for English B,”
I would assure the poet I learned from him
that we’re each a part of each other.
Now I’m the outsider,
the only person in town not welcome in Roseland
where Hollanders, Germans, and Poles once made a life.
My brother learned to swim at the local Y.
Maybe, Langston, we all attended the wrong school.
Seeing You Off to Vietnam, 1970
For Dave
I never noticed the gate number
at the airport, the throngs,
the look of your carry-on
which is what we did all that week.
I glided down the escalator
as if in a dream
knowing you’d return,
just knowing.
On the drive home I listened
to The Midnight Train to Georgia,
the lights on the L.A. freeway beacons,
a streamline to my heart.
Still humming, “his world, my world our world,”
I opened my front door--
woke up my mother to say,
“I’ve met the man I know I’ll marry.”
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