WHISTLES
by Hank Kalet
we’re blowing dog whistles in a city full of cats
chanting cat calls in an empty theater
screaming out the names of the dead in the dead of the night
in the silence before dawn
in the empty spaces between thoughts.
Language fails
as steam rises from coffee cups,
winter morning outside where
the itinerant immigrants
mass for work waiting
for a pickup, a van,
a job, fails
as the wind keens high-pitched
and cold, as the light
breaks open the dawn,
the last birds circling
like the steam from the drier vent rising
and dissipating
like the families of the children
in Haiti sent
into “domestic servitude”
by parents who cannot afford to care for them” –
poverty so bad I just can’t imagine,
sitting here with the TV on
and the dogs asleep on the couch,
so bad it doesn’t even show
in the junk mail
asking for cash,
or break through the noise
that passes for news.
- Notes:
- Line 1: from a Readings item called “Paper Jam,” from Harper’s Magazine, February 2007
- Lines 19-22: Associated Press story by Evens Sanon, Dec. 22, 2009
- Send me an e-mail.
- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Hank Kalet 