Home of the Brave

Out of the grey dusk of the city where I am walking with my friend Mike through an average September evening, comes this large fellow in a coat and tie.

He says 200 years ago the white man put his grandfather in chains and brought him west— Now his car’s broke down two blocks from here: It hasn’t been a good centennial for him,

And he says he doesn’t want to interrupt our discussion about therapy and stock portfolios, but his car is having an unhappy childhood right this minute,

the tow truck is on the way and he needs to borrow twenty dollars, which might just be coming to him

as a sort of chiropractic adjustment for the way the American dream has thrown him out of whack.

And I think: “Let’s see, twenty dollars, 200 years, that’s one dollar a decade, ten cents a year, pretty good rate for restructuring the national debt—”

Then my friend Mike with the big mouth wonders right out loud if this will possibly cure his hereditary case of Negrophobia,

And our man says, No tow truck is big enough to pull that heavy darkness from our hearts--

But that tonight, through this magical transfusion of twenty dollars the balance of fear might be infinitesimally reduced

—even fear of the dark itself, in the suffocating middle of the night, when we wake in our beds among strange shapes,

rightly enough afraid of what we cannot see

almost afraid even to speak its name.