Lawrence Joseph Poem

My Helen Thomas posts here and at Daily Kos have attracted new readers and comments. One commenter, Barbara Jones, is a family friend of Miss Thomas. Barbara's brother is the distinguished poet and lawyer Lawrence Joseph, who wrote a poem about Helen Thomas' father. Since Barbara kindly posted it in comments, I'm upgrading it to its own entry here.

All Day By Lawrence Joseph

At four in the morning
already walking
up Orleans
to Eastern Market, two,
three miles away,
a burlap bag
over his shoulder,
the rows of wooden houses
asleep. Behind
him, low horns
on the river, a full moon
casting moist
blue light; ahead, the sounds
of cars and trucks
on Vernor Highway;
above, oak branches
turning in the high winds.

All day he drops the silver
into a cigar box;
the pennies he puts
in a jar. He gives
too much credit
and the markings on
small, torn pieces
of paper bag will be
forgotten. At dusk
he fills the bag again-
with eggplant, squash,
the last pieces of shank-
and goes
to the houses he knows
don’t have enough,
saying nothing
as he gives, shaking his head
if someone starts to speak.

When the bag is empty
he walks
through the black streets
past faces rocking
on the porches. The shouts
of the children in the alley
and he’s home, to Mary,
Katherine, Anne, Matry,
Isabelle, Sabe, Josephine,
Helen, Genevieve, Basily,
and Barbara. The screen door
slams behind him.
Unnoticed, he sits down
to unlace his shoes,
to rub his sore feet.
He leans back, his eyes
close, his head
begins to nod at the voices
in the kitchen; he sees,
a world away,
the salamander sliding
down a rock, stars
dropping behind mountains
into the sea.

Note the list of daughters in the middle of the poem includes Helen. That would be our own heroine of the White House press corps, as Barbara Jones reminds us.