Charity

Charity

My mother's fading voice curled
like a tin cup shaking a single coin
when she remembered the alley singers
of her youth in the Great Depression.

Their sonorous voices soared
through curtains of faded laundry,
releasing a spray of pigeons
and rising to the clouded panes

of her window. With an outstretched
hand she would clutch a handkerchief
of tarnished change, dropping
the bundle to the minstrel below

whose poverty cried more loudly
than her own. "There's always something
you can give," she told me.
I'll keep those words as long as I live.

Mindy Kronenberg
Miller Place, NY
Oxfam