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The Moon Shatters on Alabama Avenue
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- A
wooden box rattled
- with coins for the family,
- on a stoop where the roots
- of a brown bloodstain grew.
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- Brooklyn, 1966: Agropino Bonillo was his name,
- a
neighbor, the yellow leaflet said,
- a
kitchen worker who walked home
- under the scaffolding of trains at night,
- hurrying past streetlamps with dark eyes.
- He was there when the boys surrounded him,
- quick with shouts and pushing,
- addiction's hunger in a circle.
- When he had no money,
- the kicking began.
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- The mourners clustered at the storefront,
- then marched between cadaverous buildings
- down Alabama Avenue,
- as the night turned blue with rain
- in a heavy sky of elevated track.
- The first candles struggled, smothered wet;
- onlookers leaned warily as they watched.
- A
community of faces gathered and murmured
- in the dim circles of light,
- kept alive by cupped hands.
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- In the asphalt street shined black from rain
- and windows where no one was seen
- hesitant candles appeared, a pale blur started
- on the second floor, another trembling glimmer
- slipped to the back of the march, then more,
- multiplied into a constellation
- spreading over the sidewalk,
- a
swarm of candles that throbbed descending
- tenement steps in the no longer absolute dark,
- as if the moon had shattered
- and dropped in burning white pieces
- on the night.
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- His name was Agropino Bonillo,
- spoken remembering
- every sixty dollar week
- he was bent in the kitchen,
- his children
- who could not dress for winter
- and brawled against welfare taunts
- at the schoolyard,
- the unlit night
- that the sweep of legs was stopped
- by his belly and his head.
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- And the grief of thousands illuminated city blocks,
- moving with the tired feet of the poor:
- candles a reminder of the wakes too many and too soon,
- the frustrated prayers and pleading with saints,
- in memoriam for generations of sacrificed blood
- warm as the wax sticking to their fingers,
- and years of broken streetlamps, bowed
- with dark eyes, where addiction's hunger waits
nervously.
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- Over the wooden box, a woman's face
- was slick in a drizzle of tears.
- Her hand dropped coins like seed.
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from
Trumpets
from the Islands of Their Eviction
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