I’ve seen you beaten, knifed, and robbed in lower Manhattan. I’ve seen you unhoused, shivering, and starving on a winter’s day walking on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. I’ve seen you drunk and tired at six a.m., leaning on a bar in downtown St. Louis.

I’ve seen cockroaches crawl on your children in L.A.’s many poverty places while you were working twelve torturous hours that day; wondering whether you’d make ends meet that or any week.

I’ve seen you and your children, ragged and callused, migrate from one corporate-farm shantytown to another.

Most of the world has always been under the rule of relatively few monied people who have kept you from ever entering hungry, weary, wasted lives.

This is wrong. I’d like to see it changed, still, what can be done? How can multitudes of poorer people ever embrace you?

Herb Wahlsteen earned a B.A. in English from CA. St. U., Fullerton, and an M. A. in English from Columbia U. He then worked many years as a high school teacher in New York City Public Schools. He was a finalist in the Yale Series of Younger Poets contest (1989, Adam and Eve in the 20th Century, James Merrill, judge), placed 3rd in the Writer’s Digest 77th Annual Writing Competition: Rhyming Category, and has had poems published widely.