Our sidewalk had been spared
By the fickle gods of city maintenance.
Across the street were ditches, and blasted earth,
Where unknown men sweat the cool morning,
For whom dollars were new, mysterious things,
Like childbirth or the endless patience of their women.
Today there were four or five,
Tomorrow perhaps two or three –
With no one present to see
The unmarked vehicles take them away,
Every day, for lack of permits to live;
No one who toils may stay.
From the depths of those ditches no one can hear
The lamentations of the women, their cries so clear;
Still they, too, disappear,
Their children steered
Into lives that veered in all random directions,
Like the frantic ants that flee the pounce of the spider
In some well-tended garden blessed by the fickle gods
Of city ordinances.
At my window a tiny spider has woven its delicate web,
Wet with the morning, the cool air tugging gently
At the random strands that radiate in all directions.
The spider, coiled, awaits:
Ants, children, men, lifetimes, gardens, cities, gods.
Even as I walk along my spared sidewalk,
I hear echoing the sound of shovels
Across every mansion, garden, hovel.
The ditches are dug across our strand of days:
Like brown men and spiders, none of us, though we toil,
May stay.
