Poetry July 2009 | issue 403

To The One-Legged Homeless Woman In The Pouring Rain

by Teddy Macker

TEDDY MACKER lives on an old farm in Carpinteria, California. His writing is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Court Green, and Poetry East.

When I passed you on my way home
I didn’t think about you
nor feel a hairsbreadth of sympathy.

I was talking about someone at work,
how she’d pissed me off in an e-mail.
“She’s so curt,” I think I said.

It wasn’t until hours later
while looking at the sky,
a sky whose size unsteadied me,
that I started thinking of you,
you and others like you,
all the human beings on this planet
suffering simultaneously,
the hundreds, thousands, millions. . . .
How incomprehensible, I thought,
standing there on my covered porch

while you stood on one leg
on a traffic median,
hungry and homeless
in a ruined side of Baltimore
in the pouring rain.

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