An understanding struck
Between hell and water bound
For little matchstick houses,
Stubborn sentinels on the beach.
The big one buckles its knees
Prostrate on the southern banks
Of little blue corners of the human spread,
That fold beneath its weight.
The dark-eyed Florida man
Weeps into the headline:
STEALING FOR SURVIVAL
And the babies bubbling cries
Leak from broken seashells
Sold by brown hands in distant shops.
Why should we bow our heads to the wind?
Turn our pity over to the nearly dead
No closer to moribund than they were before.
These same creatures with flashing eyes
Through the carbon-collared smoke
Of someone else’s spaces slowly burning
To bring to ours the fleeting light.
Why should we pay to this our minds
Otherwise locked in two-way mirrors,
When before we saw nothing
Of the man combing through the sticky sand,
Of the little brown hands cupping the hurricane seed.