Probably Originally Written On a Business Trip in the mid-1990s.

The Poems that are Written on Hotel Pads

The poems that are written on hotel pads,

Or other scraps of paper,

Those that are written from a heart

driven to words

Are those at times written in pain –

As an open heart scarred with a knife.

She was a beautiful child,

Yet a woman of twenty plus years

A face flawless in grace, and

Round and wide and eager

For someone to touch

A face touched too often by the world.

A beautiful woman softly black,

Wide cheeks, Wide eyes,

Sitting against a storefront

On a busy Chicago Street.

She sang in high notes,

A child’s voice within her ripe womanly frame

– and her smile was a child’s,

Frozen with a fear so deep,

The child was even deeper still.

I saw the woman,

But heard a child,

Who long ago sang to her father, who

Caressed her face and gently said,

“Rest child, I’m here, no need to fear.”

Here sang a child who grew

Safe in the love of her father

Who danced and sang and sang and danced

Blessed by a father

Who came when she called.

And now upon the street she sang

The fear and the knowledge complete,

That not every time she sang

Could the man, her father come.

The woman sang the child’s fear,

A fear so deep in darkness –

It extinguished the light within her eyes.

She sang seeing,

And yet perhaps sweetly blind

To the awful reality

Of her complete aloneness.

The eyes saw not, save the visions

Of happier times

The mind divided now between the street

And the comfort of her father’s arms.

Why is she lost?

May God bless her, for now doing the best she knows how,

And gently echo within her ear and soul,

“Rest child, I’m here, no need to fear.”