The country in which I love you
isn’t one of Beemers and Champagne brunches
so much as of coveralls and sack lunches,
of work gloves, goggles, and such.
Nor is it one of a Barbados holiday,
powerfully as you still feel the pull of the bay,
knowing as well as anything,
for each taste of the cane, the lash’s sting.
See, it’s one where granddaughter lived
for the air holes in the top of a pot
when others did not,
and where, at the same time, these so-called “patriots”
won’t do to you as to Baby Sister at Sand Creek
because the rest of us won’t just stay meek.
David Stevenson
Farmington