This is not a poem
Wendy Brown-Baez

Sometimes the world is achingly beautiful.

We are crammed in the bus, just crammed, and the night air is sulky and sweet, summer
winding its way around our throats, a silken caress to soften our scowls.

While waiting at the bus stop, I notice the neighbor across the street sitting in his lawn
chair drinking a beer and listening to music and you can just feel his happiness radiating
out to the street, kicked back on a Friday evening.

chorus:
1. Sometimes the world is achingly beautiful.
2. Sometimes the world is achingly beautiful.
3. Sometimes the world is achingly beautiful.

The Latina girls giggle on the bus in their tank tops, red and orange and green, and the
black girls get on with their bangley earrings and gold sandals, while the bus lurches
through the dusk falling on us like a tide of good wishes.

People on the bus are glued to their cell phones.  Like people who talk to themselves
sitting on the benches with nowhere to go, unable to imagine getting away from the
voices in their heads. We all have voices in our heads these days.

chorus:
4. This is not a poem
5. We all have voices in our heads and sometimes the world is achingly beautiful.

And a man in a grey jacket and thinning hair gets on the bus, trailing a scent of cigarette
smoke and bitterness. At first I am not listening but then I can’t help it, his voice is low
but intrusive. He is saying, Where is God in all this mess? There is no God, look at the
way he lets us suffer. If I met God, I would spit on him, I been suffering for 30 years,
can’t eat what I want, go where I want. I have no life, just pain, man. What more can God
do to me, huh? Only thing else he can do is kill me, and I wish he would and just get it
over with, man.
And I can’t tell if he is talking to the man slouched in his seat across the
aisle or just into the air of the bus. The dark chocolate man, his bowed back tells a tale of
woe, he wears a dirty t-shirt and broken sneakers. He says, Where the love, man? Can’t you
give us some love?
and reaches out a hand to shake his.

chorus:
6. Sometimes the world is achingly beautiful: Where is God in all this mess?
7. Where is God in all this mess?

 

The blonde couple across from me with the chubby, bouncy baby ring the bell. It’s my
stop, too, and we all get up.  I almost turn to the man and say, Look, God came to see you
today. Look at that man shaking your hand and that baby giving her smiles away for free.
That’s God, man. Wake up
. But I don’t.

chorus:
8. That’s God, man. Wake up.
9. That’s God, man. Wake up. Sometimes the world is achingly beautiful.
10. I sure hope he finds out: Sometimes the world is achingly beautiful.

 

I climb down the steps of the bus and think about how God once deserted me and how it
almost killed me. But didn’t. And I walk away to a party where I know no one but will
have a swell time anyway, just happy those days are over. And I think, I sure hope that
man finds out someday that he was wrong.

11. This is not a poem. Sometimes the world is aching beautiful.
12. I hope he finds out but this is not a poem.