A Blind Spot

A beggar, trained to stretch his thin open hand
Like a sundial all the day long
And to gaze in feigned shame at the ground,
Wondering if it is fate or a man’s hate
To live like a damned insect in a dump
And be a shadow crawling in the dust.
On a corner of Independence Avenue, which he called his workplace,
He stood like a statue of Liberty around a heap of his collected junk,
Artifacts of street life, a museum of himself
Awaiting a dirham and maybe two
To fight his hunger for a single day.
Passersby, self-absorbed, numb and blind,
Walk past with purposeful pace.
To kids, he seems a wild toothless animal in the savanna of the city.
For their parents, he is a good example of a bad thing to teach a moral lesson.
Those parents never give him a thing and teach charity.
Other parents hand a coin to a son
To drop on the rag laid out in front of him.
Their pitying gazes betray an inner satisfaction
Not to be in the same situation.
Their coins, spare drops of rain in a dry season,
Never reach the wrinkled seed of his hidden pain.
When, on rare occasions, he raises his head;
He thinks he is watching a patriotic parade
Part of him admires their shiny black shoes,
Their warm and woolly raglan coats
And he inhales the lemon cologne on their clean blouses.
Sometimes he wishes to have their lives.
At other times he wishes he were born dumb and blind
Instead of crippled.
With time, he grows firmer and calmer
He accepts that his lot can’t be better and devotes himself
To stinking up their world with his unwashed armpits and crotch,
And spreading his rat’s nest of junk on display
Where they will see it every day.