Gentrification

Gentrification


Let us remember the wasps
that hibernate in the walls
of the house next door. Its walls
bulged with twenty pounds of wasps

And nest, twenty pounds of black
knots and buzzing fists. We slept
unaware that the wasps slept
so near us. We slept in black

Comfort, wrapped in our cocoons,
while death's familiars swarmed
unto themselves, but could have swarmed
unto us. "Do not trust cocoons."

That is the lesson of this poem.
Or this: "Luck is beautiful."
So let us praise our beautiful
white neighbors. Let us write poems

For she who found the wasp nest
while remodeling this wreck.
But let us remember the wreck
was, for five decades the nest

for a black man and his father.
Both men were sick and neglected,
so they know how to neglect,
and then kind death stopped for the father

and cruelly left behind the son,
whose siblings quickly sold the house
because it was only a house.
For months, that drunk and displaced man

Appeared on our street like a ghost.
Disraught, he sat in his car and wept
because nobody else had wept
enough for his father , whose ghost

Took the form of ten thousand wasps.
That's the lesson of this poem:
"Grief is dangerous and unpredictable
as a twenty pound nest of wasps."

Or this: "Houses are haunted
not by the dead." So let us pray
for the living. Let us pray
for the wasps and sons who haunt us.


Sherman Alexie

from his book FACE.