It's Wednesday, so this is a snap, I suppose. It's actually the only Real
Snap I've done on petc. The others [early on] were misnamed 'snap', and
then I no longer 'snapped' but sent in poems.
BEAUTY OF PRIVILEGE
this time I belong
a tiny home that someone else dreamed
in your country
someone here modified
someone else built just down a bit
and across the street from Lafayette River
one of those men knew the view I'd see
from my 19th c fainting couch
a sitting room furnished in charity shop finds
loved and passed along, like adopted children,
to those who loved and passed them along
how did they know what I'd see?
my eyes need these 40-foot fuzzy pines
and a front garden of Russian olive trees---
the off-beat hearts of fuchsia in a green bush---
which owner of this home so hid and overgrown
knew what I'd see?
the same one who planted a tall corn stalk
behind the tall flag pole---both so American--
the man who bumped out an office wall
for a huge mosaic shower room
how did he know I no longer
straddle a tub like a Degas nude?
forty years ago, in Taipei, I lay
in a mosquito-netted bed
incense-coil on the floor
as 11 hammocks of workers
slept in the next room
I, a wealthy American, it was thought,
could take their bedroom for a few days
I, the friend of the home owner
whose business downstairs they ran
I bought a worker's simple cracked rice bowl
at noon next day
and began to starve
found a room in a R&R hotel
dodged 8-inch cockroaches at night
listened to the gentle query
of a blind massage woman led upstairs
to the soldier's room next to mine
no longer wanted as a tutor to the neighbours'
children, I toured the island as a guest of the
their grown son
days of motorcycle freedom
oxen-plowed fields of pineapple
fish farms, perilous suspension bridges
of rope, hand-woven linen clothing
and something he expected from me
but never got
my paychecks found, boxed china dish tucked underfoot
I flew back to America
and the privilege of beauty again and again
of loss again and again
my former gardener says, after heart surgery
and now dialysis for life
"I am blessed! I'm alive!"
he is my Privilege of Beauty
and the tiny kindergarteners loaded
with backpacks running across the street
while I weep
at the beauty of privilege
all of it, all of them, my home
____________
jbprince
a scoop of Lafayette River
in the cooling rain
on this rust-velvet fainting couch
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