November

One of my fondest memories from a bus trip across town on a November afternoon on East Sixty Sixth Street is that of a Black man reading poetry to a Black child; his daughter, perhaps, in a pink Taffeta dress, impeccable braids, and long white socks sitting around her knee. The rarity of this occurrence is what, I believe, makes this particular encounter so memorable to me; the digitization of the modern daily has made reading poetry, or reading anything for that matter, in a public receptacle like the toe of a bus, a matter of total antiquity.

Repeat after me, he said to her:

And her hair was a
     folded flower
And the quiet of
    love in her feet.

I recognized this as Yeats, the same poem my grandfather would read to me when cancer was consuming his lungs.