Overture
So I stepped off the streetcar
and walked to the bus stop,
marveling at the city around me,
and at the young woman I could never be
standing as if beautiful
with her tattooed neck
and metal studs through her nose and ears,
and actually she was beautiful,
singing a familiar tune, its notes of grace
filling the space between the two of us,
and suddenly too a limping man
with his cardboard WILL-WORK-FOR-FOOD sign
like the title of a poem and not his life,
but who was he then,
because he began to hum, and the woman,
teeth not yellow like his, smiling at him,
reached into the breast pocket
of her denim jacket while she sang,
and fluttered a five-dollar bill toward him
like some butterfly, which reminded me
of my mother, who sang on the bed of her death
as if song could keep her alive, or maybe
it was I who imagined this, a prayer
not for the dead but from the dying,
my mother in her purple gown
singing as if Death were not the name
of anything, but part of an overture,
her brown eyes earnest like those
of the woman at the bus stop in my new city
where I did not yet know who I would become
but now it seemed I was at least a singer
at a bus stop, for my own voice joined in
without my permission and the three of us hovered
in the mellifluous air on the darkening sidewalk
as the bus came to us and lifted us
together and away.— Andrea Hollander
I think this poem is a lovely complement to Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden. Several times towards the end of the book, I thought of the closing pages of Adam Makos’ A Higher Call. I’ve talked about that once before, in a post on Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual, so I won’t describe it again here. But I thought about it again as I was reading Hollander’s poem. All lovely, beautiful complements of mercy.
(If you have not read A Higher Call — good lord, what are you waiting for??)