a “golden shovel”
after Gwendolyn Brooks
Sometimes she pretends it
does not bother her, how the man shushes
his daughter on the bus as it
clatters into neighborhoods white as the snow that hushes
them, or the
unceasing self-satisfied loudness
of those snowy drunken theatergoers who pile in
with their distaste for the
chocolate written on their faces plain as road
signs. Sometimes it
is not in her to fight but it flitter-twitters
in her stomach, the noticing, and
if she claims to be someone who laughs
it away
she is lying to herself.
Anyone from
that side of town, she thinks,
anyone who looks like me
could not laugh it away.
Down the aisle, the child laughs
despite her father’s warning, despite a
fragile peace in the air like a lovely
poison gas, despite the whiteness
on all sides and
how rudely, how whitely
it stares. The sight of that girl whirls
her fifteen years ahead. That girl will be kept away
from riffraff, taught to
carry herself proudly, to be
more than some
photograph token or other
vessel of pleasantry, where
her brilliant smile still
falters between the white
of her companions. That girl will grow up tall and cool as
a glass of cocoa milk
meant to be drunk by the eyes of onlookers or
suitors, men whose shirts
she will wear to bed for a while and then forget. So
fleeting the thoughts inside that beautiful
head. So much the harder to bear when it
strikes her that beauty hurts.