April 7, 2009

With my bags still packed
from a 4-week vacation
and my beard more ragged than usual,
I wonder how many of these
middle-class Houstonians who pass
quickly by my current park bench, think
that this leisure park is my home.

Surely children's hands have been
gripped tighter since mothers saw me,
and the scennc stroll past my particular path
is seemingly less attractive than others.

I am forced now to review my own
assumptions. How many slumbering
men and women on the streets of our father cities
were just travelers in repose, worn and weary
from a long journey that they'll one day
end in a host of warm hands and lifted glasses.

How many of these buskers and bums,
drunks and derelicts, homeless and has-beens
are just passing through, prodigal children,
waiting for the fatted calf to be cut.