Safe at Home

An ambulance and a police man

and the homeless man

stranded like a rental scooter

in the bushes

I don’t know if he’s dead

or dying as I go by

at 40 miles an hour

on this Boulevard passing

the fanciest bus station

in all of Tallahassee

Makes me think a bit

of my Mississippi family tradition

uncles 60 years apart

found in the flower bushes

outside a union hall

hard to say what killed them

mostly alcohol, i suppose.

That and a discussion

by a panel of poets

about writing in English

born with a foreign tongue

makes me think of the words

that came to Mississippi

from God knows where

mostly died in the bushes

corn fields,

cotton rows,

along the banks of

coldwater creeks

in the middle of the night.

I suppose the ambulance

driver and the policeman

will make it home safe tonight

and the homeless man

has no home whether

he makes it safe tonight or not

and uncles dead all those years ago

and me not yet

 just remembering