One day Moshe found a home.
After years of running from the law
reading tablets in the tenement hall
tracing the names on the obsidian wall
of the Vietnam Memorial
playing oboe in the subway tunnel
and underneath the lavender stars,
Moshe found a home.
Not a nice one, mind you.
No promised land of milk & honey,
no thin mint perched on his pillow.
Here at the bottom of Fort Reno hill
where sheep once grazed & Union soldiers lay their heads
where ex-slaves sang their Freedman’s song
and boys marched footballs across muddy wastes
muttering over the burnt crusts of their lives
Moshe made his home.
Steering his shopping cart through the reeds
he pitched his trench coat as a tent
against the bite of autumn wind
and dusted the flies from his long dreadlocks.
Leaving blood on the lintel of his darkening brow,
he listened for the love songs of bullfrogs at dusk
hoping somehow, this too would pass over.
Reeds grew around him as he lingered & watched
the hill up above for some kind of sign.
In turn, the hill brooded over the city:
the Washington Monument’s great obelisk
the temples of might along the Potomac
til one day Moshe cried out loud
“This place has become my house of bondage.”
And on that day he stood up, a snake in each hand
and parted the quivering sea of reeds.
Climbing the hill, he peered over the edge,
and seeing there what could not be told
he turned to the east, and disappeared.
Alexander Levering Kern is a native of Washington, DC who has worked as a housed ally and advocate alongside homeless communities in DC, Philadelphia, and now Boston. His poetry and writing have appeared in many magazines and journals such as Spare Change News, Blue Collar Review, Georgetown Review, Caribbean Writer, and others. A Quaker, he was first inspired to work around homelessness by the nonviolent witness of Mitch Snyder and the Community for Creative Non-violence in the 1980s, and later, by the Catholic Worker Movement.
