The Children at the Edge of the Knife Blade
Curtain of night falls on Wharf Avenue
Covers the blank eyes of boarded up windows,
covers the rusted tricycles, the broken scooters,
covers what the businessmen in the towers downtown
refuse to see.
Someone lights a fire in a barrel
and a crap game gathers,
forms a circle in the wilderness
draws an old conclusion from a ring of faces.
Children squat with games of jax and chalk
until the black car glides by with a
“pop,” “pop,” “pop”
and a child’s cry rises from the pavement
as the blood pools up.
***
These are the children
at the edge of the knife blade
who sleep in concrete cubicles,
who eat in cockroach kitchens,
who wake in the night with fear
jangling along the small nerves,
who listen for the sirens and the
sharp pop of the ricocheting bullet.
Mr. President.
You will not come and walk down this sidewalk.
Not with a whole division of your army
and your secret service
would you come here.
You will not come and hear
the mother’s keening wail
that begins far off,
rises to a crescendo—
until the businessman in the subway station thirty blocks
downtown suddenly puts down his stock pages
and stares into space, trying to locate the
source of the faint sound
invisible to him as the wind
that rises up the stairs
into the clear night air.
.
.
Phyllis Martin is currently working on a trilogy of fiction: an expose of the 1099 Crusades and the effects of large-scale brainwashing on the innocent farmers and country people of France and countries caught in the middle. Phyllis received her MA from Binghamton University and was one of 13 students nominated for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her poems have been previously published in Wordpeace.