Today's poem is by D. Nurkse

Not Yet American
       

At the end we are marching and yelling, waving signs we inked in ourselves, just as we did when
we were kids.

The street never changes. Drinkers watch from a bar, suds glinting on their upper lips. A bald
man is being shaved in a barbershop. The chair swivels toward us: how round those eyes are, in a
face smothered under lather. A baker in a white paper bag hat stares from a doorway, poised to
clap flour from his hands. Behind an iron grille, a nun sighs and crosses herself.

Apparently we will always have to march, singing to keep awake, calling "peace" and "justice"
as if those sibilants could answer: in the numbing cold, even in the night sky, in the empty
quadrant of Scorpio.

There you'll find us, and the street too, since it stretches forever. A bodega with steel gates. A
jiffy lube. A chainlink fence on which a child has spraypainted the first stroke of the first letter of
a name.

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Copyright © 2023 D. Nurkse All rights reserved
from A Country of Strangers
Knopf
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission