The street cleaner moves along the circle
where we live now behind a manicured lawn
in a brick townhome – the first brick anything
we’ve owned. You have no doubt

assumed that we are white — and you would be
correct, though at least a few of our neighbors
(African-, Chinese-, Pakistani-American)
might flinch at that assumption.

Stiff metal bristles twirl, slow, slow,
beneath the cleaner truck, scraping up 
mostly a lack of dirt. It is quiet
on this street. Sunlight quiet among trees

in a small park across the way.  Not like our first
apartment, hard against asphalt, against the “inner”
city where kids traded pills, and worse, outside our door.
Before that my husband grew up in a five-room house

clean and modest, asbestos-shingled, his mother’s
beauty parlor in the back. None of our parents
had running water, growing up in rural houses–
at least at first. You see where I’m headed here:

we are part of how things worked well–
for some of us. For a while.  
The product of the GI bill for him 
(after Vietnam) and for my dad, post WWII.

We live on a street bought with their sacrifice,
bought with the lives of the ones (black and white
and otherwise) who didn’t make it back.
It’s not enough, not what they fought to make,

until we learn that no one’s safe unless all of us are.
And though the loudest sound at morning here
is birdsong in air clear, at least for now,
of bullets, tear gas, acrid smoke, and even rain,

the fire that needed to be lit burns closer.