Major American Poets -Walt Whitman

 

Glimpses of Ordinary People

                                                                                          by Lisa Boston Frye

 

           At the crosswalk, a gray haired guard in yellow slicker stands sentinel in the rain, a bent sunflower his umbrella.

           A yelping boy splashes barefoot through murky puddles, pumps stubby arms in windmill spirals as he races for shelter from the wet.

           A helmeted railroad worker leans comfortably on a pickaxe, smiles laconically as he waves slow traffic past a slumbering train.

           An elderly farmer bows over a field of brightly colored wildflowers.  Statuelike and drabbed in baggy old clothes, he’s a human scarecrow.  Is he alive or dead today, I wonder as I walk by.

           An aspiring star shoots rap lyrics into the payphone mouthpiece, his machine gun style a cosmic gig for distant operators.

           A baker offers the fruit of his labor and hungry eyes open in wonder as he caresses frosting smeared cinnamon rolls, chocolate chip cookies, double stuffed whoopie pies.

           A store clerk’s fingers fly efficiently across the keyboard, as she jokes, laughs, flirts with her customers amid the plumbing supplies, hardware, nuts and bolts.  An endless stream of customers is her rapt audience.

           An operator pushes down the vision of broken bodies bloodied in a Manhatten street, as she connects a shrieking caller to 911.

           Daughter bends to lay a single rose at the open grave of her beloved father, a suicide at eighty two.  A tear falls from her cheek, catches on an edge of red petal, pools there; a dull ache of regret shrouds her broken heart.

           Mother hugs to her breast an only son, her eldest child as he rushes through the kitchen door, out of her life, on his way to college, to independence and manhood.  Her hand, an empty caress, waves goodbye. 

           Wife dabs a final coat of paint to the kitchen cabinets in her new apartment over the hardware store weeks after fleeing her home, a cheating husband and a twenty-five year relationship.  Freed of yesterday’s broken promises she steps out of her cocoon.

           Hesitant walks into the classroom, a new student at forty six, eager to learn but worried he will be too old, look foolish, fail miserably.  He aces two weeks homework that night and almost never looks back.

           Glimpses of ordinary people.