Tony pokes my shoe and asks for money.
I've been sleeping, just barely, folded badly,
Waiting for morning, waiting for a reason not to try.
It's a noisy quiet here, loud and empty this silence:
Floor cleaning machines, pulled by night shift workers.
Tony says he’s a preacher, and he worked
At the White House back in the day,
And he knows Bill Gates from before he was famous.
And I wonder if this is what Tony does every night,
Walking through a hollowed out terminal
Which isn’t terminal at all, but some kind of purgatory
Lined with benches designed to be uncomfortable,
Not really hiding men like me trying to sleep,
A little, but not really.
Tony insists he and I are cut from the same cloth:
Preachers, the two of us, look at that, he says,
Called to a gospel of peace, sequence of sacred choices.
He'll get a dollar here, and then another over there,
And maybe he'll go home at sunrise,
And maybe there's a place there, a bed there,
Somebody who's waited for him there,
All night long.
I'm getting on a plane in a while,
When the light begins to play in distant hills;
And who am I to say where Tony goes now.
What we have, between three and four
In the morning that's not yet,
Is a moment, a story, a suggestion that
We are cut from the same cloth.
Maybe the choice is mine.
DGJ
Washington National
8/7/18
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| Washington National, Overnight, DGJ |
