Today I rode the bus with the children of Pecos, Texas.
So packed in like sardines were we,
That several children found themselves sitting
Cross legged on the floor, in the middle of the aisle between the seats.
One such child was an eight year old Hispanic,
And I want to call him a man instead of a boy,
Because I remember his face, his old soul eyes.
I remember how he took an old coke can
That had rolled up beside him from the back of the bus somewhere,
And he pulled a pair of tin snips out of his pocket
And began singing in Spanish,
With the voice of a thousand ancient warriors.
I felt the bus swerve and looked up to see,
We had avoided running over a big dead dog in the road
That someone else had hit earlier with their car.
I could see up ahead several more animal carcasses
Dotting the highway.
But the artist’s song kept me spellbound.
I would glance up at the road ahead, occasionally,
Always returning my gaze quickly to watch the sharp cuts he made on the metal.
And as I listened to his melody, I discovered
That his song told of his day at school.
He sang was about how the teacher had asked the children
To write a page about what they were going to be when they grew up and why,
And he had gotten a zero because
He couldn’t write.
But now he sang,
About the plight of all the children,
Yet how everything was going to be alright anyway,
A beautiful heartfelt spontaneous hymn.
He sang about how “what he was going to be when he grew up,”
Was exactly the same thing he was now:
A person who sits cross legged on the floor
And makes art out of trash.
He was going to specialize in tiny decorative saddles
That he would make out of old coke cans.
And it was exactly when I heard that lyric in his verse,
It hit me that
That is exactly what he was making.
The last few snips on the can,
A few critical bends and folds,
And miraculously,
The most bejeweled looking tiny decorative saddle I ever saw
Appeared out of the crumpled aluminum.
The bus swerved.
I looked to see.
We had just avoided another dead dog
Lying on the highway.
-jenn
