they’ve tried to mechanize, machine tool, the kindness business,
since it seems that being kind is no longer intuitive, au naturel,
but you and I can still scratch off the genes rusted shut that
help the elderly who set out to cross the street knowing full well
20 seconds ain’t enough to make over four lanes with a gait that
don’t move giddy up no more, even with a walker or a cane
the city sidewalks are tremulously arrayed with cracks and rough,
mini sized rises, even small hillocks, that we rushabouts rate noticed
until we have been tripped up in a prior excursion in that same spot
a child once ran out of the park onto the avenue, looking distressed,
in a city that’s overloaded with risk and dangerous one doesn’t want to imagine, wife says “something’s wrong,” sure enough a dawdler,
walking home with her dad, looks up and he is not visible; panicked,
who knew that in an a city of millions, where separation is a hell lot wider than five degrees of separation, that she would know my children, and let me walk her home; the father of course, hunting for her in all the wrong places, I walk her home…the mother, semi-stunned, asks how she could ever thank us, was surprised at my answer…”When your husband returns home to confess his misdeed, having lost his child, just greet him without opprobrium and blame,
for he has already punished himself far worse than you ever could…”
it is in the small things that we acknowledge that we are more alike
than not, and we are knotted in a single strand in ways we cannot
always ken, and sometimes, do not want to acknowledge, for this
temple building business is not without risk, but surely it is a structure built of bricks of loving compassion, and essences of goodness, the small kindnesses in our blood cells, that all of us innately possess...
Small Kindnesses
By Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/magazine/poem-small-kindnesses.html
