RAIN
It seems
to be raining. Really raining.
Feet soaked.
Picket signs
curling in on themselves,
a single line of type visible.
“Don’t go in!”
hurled at passing drivers,
especially “the browns” –
UPS carriers, Teamsters. Veterans
of their own strikes, they replied:
"Honk! Honk!" Their wipers beat gently.
A scrap of news:
remember that old professor?
Was thrown out of “his” office!
(That kerchief of a space shared
with the Chair’s secretary!)
Who would not protect this gentle man,
a life in teaching, genre fiction
collected in worn books, scattered papers
piled around a borrowed computer?
Always a spot in the doorway
to exchange a note on some oddity
of the published word.
The Chair declared:
Not teaching your class – no space.
You’ve got to clear out now.
And so he gathered today’s writing,
crossed the sodden open campus to the library,
toward the desk of his friend and colleague,
a worried-eyed reference librarian,
now out on the line.
The rain came down in sheets.
The old professor settled in
too shaken to drive home alone.
Weren’t the indignities
of his last chemo, a month ago
enough this year?
His friend’s former work study
fussed and brought him a nice cup of tea.
Due to quick wrangling, she now was
a student aide, her work protected
On the line,
one shift was ending, as
new dry recruits were arriving.
“Hey there! Any fresh signs?”
I replied, “Over here, in that trunk.
Hey, do you know the rest of the verses to
‘We Will Not Be Moved’?"
turning home in my thoughts and
saving the part of my sign
which could be saved, trashing
the rest.
On the English/
History/Art History
branch of the line,
people talked
but no one sang.
###
-- Elizabeth Marino (REV. 23 February 2006, Chicago)
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