with actual warmth
my working days’ renaissance
the school year begins

teachers’ joy, kids’ joy
collaboration and fun
where was this last year?

to put students first
we must see through their small souls
our world’s their future

hope renewed, i’ll start
with the first smile of morning
let us be the best

eighty years of growth
add: wealth, greed, inept builder
gone in just one day

every night, an empty street
but for the spinning tires
and giggly routines
of our young world travelers

for a moment yesterday,
cave people emerged,
filling the block
with ice cream and laughter,
though we’d never seen their faces before

how impossible, twenty-four
houses to a block, and we’re
the only twenty-first century
Neanderthals willing to play outside?

at least fifteen children
filled their cones for free ice cream
while the adults swapped
stories about perpetually closed blinds
to keep the bogeyman
from staking a claim on their flat screens

is this how it feels to touch
the upper middle? where he and i
stand sidelined because we don’t
have a personal chef,
patients at six a.m.,
or the nerve to book our children’s
lives so full that they never see
the light of day?

i’ll take my old hood,
my blue-collar cul-de-sac,
where my kids played with the neighbors
till the streetlights came on,
or the vacant lot in Cartagena
where the Moroccans–poor immigrants like us–
taught them how to pick figs from trees and make chalk out of broken pieces of wall

all of this i carried on the tip of my tongue
as the party ended, the street emptied,
and the wealth blocked out all light…

all life.

until the moment when our doors open,
our girls run free,
and the cavemen come back to their roots