Honor Your Heritage

At the far end of the tent, where they have closed it off
from the people on the porches of the neighborhood
that sprung up like crabgrass around the flower
of the house, turning at its edges and beginning to wilt,
people whose blood trickles in my veins but whom
I have never met pore through piles of pictures
accumulated like dust behind the books in a bookeshelf
left standing and stocked only for show, no one
actually reading anything but all of us spellbound
at the fancy bindings that connote by age such splendor
and weight and importance, and in the meantime, outside,
among the buzzing of the bees that carry on with life,
the masonry rots, and to some, like me, it looks attractive...

06/02/96