EVERY ROAD
Every road should come to this end:
A place called home.
When you don't have one
the expanse of sky is your roof,
the vast fields of green your living room.
Every city, your city,
When you speak, you speak for the country.
In the wrinkled faces and the sun-scarred eyes
mother earth calls us to fury.
Every child without a home
is everyone's child.
The daily murders go unanswered:
To die of cold in Southern California.
To starve in New York City,
the restaurant capital of the world.
To have no coat in the Broadway of coats.
The crimes pile up as high as the mountains
of grain that are warehoused and stored away
from those who need it.
A mother's child is taken away for neglect
because she can't pay rent
and eat at the same time.
Children born of a labor of love are condemned
for the lack of labor.
Mothers crawl through city veins
like blood on the grapevine.
Every road should come to this end.
A place called home.
--Luis J. Rodriguez
From The Concrete River, Curbstone Press, 1991