Mr. Africa Poetry Lounge!
Rooming Houses are Old Women
Rooming houses are old women
rocking dark windows into their whens
waiting incomplete circles
rocking
rent office to stoop to
community bathrooms to gas rings and
under-bed boxes of once useful garbage
city issued with a twice monthly check
and the young men next door
with their loud midnight parties
and fishy rings left in the bathtub
no longer arouse them
from midnight to mealtime no stops inbetween
light breaking to pass through jumbled up windows
and who was it who married the widdow that Buzzie's son messed with?
To Welfare and insult from the slow shuffel
from dayswork to shopping bags
heavy with leftovers.
Rooming houses
are old women waiting
searching
through darkening windows
the end or beginning of agony
old women seen through half-ajar doors
hoping
they are not waiting
but being
the entrance to somewhere
unknown and desired
but not new.
Written by Audre Lorde (1934-1992)
<----> SEND THIS POEM TO A FRIEND! <---->