In Babylon After Ezra

My brothers' people have gone away.

They loaded their truck with conviction yesterday

and left our street for some Godawful

dirt town where their kids will play

with sticks. They said they want it simple:

work and church and babies. All

the noise (They mean others lives

and skins and money and how our sons fall

in with their sons and with their daughters.)

was too much. To them it was noise,

the street music. There was one

uncle lingering with dark, full eyes

who said (hand on heart), “ I must find in

here something as big as Babylon.”

He should have stayed. Should have kept living

with destitute men collecting littered tin

into shopping carts on Saturday morning

and the noise the neighbors are always making

and the helicopters and the mummers.

With the smell of injira cooking

just there, eight feet across

the alley. It is street music. Downstairs

the mulatta angel and the Polish boy

hopscotch and wait for our girls

to join them. The neighbors begin to play

the theme from Bolero loudly, repeatedly.

I make coffee to carry down

to the stoop. I look up and see

a naked girl put her hair in a bun

through a far, open window. She's gone

just as suddenly. I laugh, gather

up our mugs. We sit on the steps in the sun.

At Market Street I watched my daughter,

age five, trying to piece together

the meaning of “Girls! Girls! Girls!”

in blinking neon. She asks. I tell her,

then take her hand and walk down Babylon's

mainstreet. Every night there are gunshots.

Hasidim mix with hipsters at the fishmarket

in Chinatown where they will sell you eels

born in the Euphrates. Too much here that

is real for laws in books to keep straight

however often they recite what is written.

My pale, bookish brothers blink their exhausted

eyes and find their Scripture too thin

a veil to conceal the lovely body of everyone:

the world. You can see from here where God

made the tower we made together fall down.

We're at it again. Did you hear that Spanish kid?

I can understand most of what he said.