This Machine (with apologies to Woody Guthrie)

doesn’t kill fascists

it saves poor children, not from traffic,

but obscurity

as it saves the old man in the dirty hat with dirtier broken fingernails.

 

It doesn’t build houses you can live in

but houses to live in your mind:

the white house with curving sloped stoop on seventeenth in East Hill,

the old farm house with a brick façade between Selma and Montgomery

where the racist man watched the marchers pass.

 

It builds the past now so future time travelers can enter the late 20th century

without wearing a space suit.