Last Saturday I stopped by the Detroit Public Library. While casually browsing through the stacks, I spotted a young man dressed in full gangsta' gear. He marched back and forth between the shelves, where he thought no one could see him, holding a book of poetry up in his eyes. Silently, he mouthed the words of the stanzas of the poems as he stepped triumphantly up and down the aisle, pausing only to hike up his sagging pants, or to make a turn when he ran out of space.
Then he spotted me watching him, and he snatched the book down and hid it; snatched it down, with the quickness. He cranked his cap to the side, put on his thug face, and with a big wide swing of his body, a gangsta' lean, he swaggered off to some other hidden spot in the library to read his poetry.
Some people say Detroit is a horror, a ruin. I see a garden, a glorious garden growing.
Can't you see?
1 comment:
I guess you can't judge a book by it's cover.
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