Calendar Girl

I wrote this as "therapy" several years ago, disheartened and obsessing about how homeless humans make it on the streets.  

 

                              Calendar Girl

            

                Coming out of sleep’s silky peace   
                as first light floods the sky,
                her heart races into wakefulness.
                She moves quickly
                through morning rituals,
                making a check-mark
                on the wall calendar
                in the square for April 7.

                Someone is coming today
                to hear her story.
                She will tell them
                it wasn’t something she had
                thought of, not for a minute,
                giving up the scholarship
                to care for her mother;
                she never meant to give up
                everything, just school for a while.

                This is the best place
                she has slept lately,
                this concrete loading dock
                where so far she has been
                undisturbed by the police.
                We criminalize poverty
                in America.
                Where had she heard that?

                Most days she walks
                to the main library downtown,
                searches for work on the internet,
                hopes whatever she is reading
                hasn’t been checked out.
                Once she squirreled a book
                in the wrong section--Jane Austen.
                Book-hiding is her only crime.

                Strangers hurry by, looking
                away.  Frightened.
                How can they be afraid of her?
                Some seem embarrassed.
                But why?  They paid for the shiny cars
                at the meters they rush to feed.
               
                              
                It’s okay.     Elegant women
                step out of Main Street condos,
                women who need long mirrors 

                to convince them 

                they're worthy of being seen.                                
                They look fine.
                She doesn’t resent them.
                She only minds that they’re afraid.

                Later, down at the creek she’s
                interviewed under the bridge:
                “What do you want; what do you hope for?”

               To  get a job. . . go back to school— 

                To understand.

                Mostly, to understand.
       
                Posted on a girder,
                the calendar is on her side,
                turning the vastness of time
                into neat squares she can manage.