Ode to My Heart.

• Author: Bass, Ellen
• Position: Poem - Poem

My own heart let me have more pity on.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

It's late in the day and the old school's deserted but the door's unlocked. The linoleum dips and bulges, the halls have shrunk. And I shiver with a kind of pity for the child who entered those bricks, her small face looking out from the hood of a woolen coat. My heart is like this child, tying its shoes every morning, drinking its sugared cup, half coffee, half milk, trudging to the bus stop in the still dark dawn choked with snow or muddy spring, the sky garlanded with green. Weary, fearful, it sharpens a yellow pencil with a kitchen knife and sets out alone. My father told me when he was a boy the Jews lived on one block...