YOU WHO LOOK AT US IN ALARM…

You who pass us in the street you look at us in alarm, eyes wide and lips clenched, a stern look that says you don’t like us

and that we ought to disappear from your world.

 

You look at us in alarm because you deem us but trash who dirty your street and make your community unsightly and

unsanitary…

…the street on which my family and I live.

 

You look at us with alarm and pinch your nose when you pass me, my wife and my four kids, because we wear tattered clothes,

have soot and dirt on our faces, and don’t smell like the cologne that you wear.

 

You smirk when you glance at the cart that

lies at the side of the road that you know serves as our home where we huddle at night covered with just a tarp

to shelter us from the cold and rain.

 

You look at us with alarm and wish the police will take us away or that the Social Welfare workers

will send us back to the boondocks where you deem us we belong. But you should be more alarmed At the fate of my four children

should nothing happen to change our lives for the better.

 

You should be more  alarmed if they grow up ignorant, unskilled, uneducated, only knowing the hard bitter life of

the homeless. For when they grow up in this manner they will become tomorrow’s thieves,

prostitutes, bums, more society’s dregs to add to its problems, leading lives no better than  ours now.

 

Yes, I ask you to look at us with alarm for we represent the failure of our society to care for those who have suffered adversities

and to provide for opportunities for those who have less in life.

 

We do not love the life we lead. We do not like living on the street a cart for a home, the sidewalk and the street

for a playground for our children.

We do not like scrounging for food, and depending on Good Samaritans, though we appreciate their kindness and concern.

 

We do not like, most of all, being looked down on because of our destitution, because of our shabbiness,

because while we are poor and have nothing but a cart and the clothes on our back, we have nurtured through

all the hard, long years our pride and our dreams for a better life.

 

We dream too of a better future, not so much for us but for our children.

A proper education for them, a home no matter how simple and bare but one we can call our own, three meals a day,

and a caring look from those who pass us day by day.

 

But most of all, we seek a society that recognizes us not just as social detritus but as human beings who are down but not out.

For we seek to strive to improve our lot, because the dreams we have,

have never died, just stifled by circumstances and by people who view us, not with understanding and compassion,

but with fear and alarm.