Swept Clean
Author: Bill Roberts
Bring back old men with their gnarly
whisk brooms, just twigs tied together,
old black men bent in the gutters
sweeping the detritus of their fellow men
whose tasks were nobler perhaps
though they cast off their refuse
that gave thse humble men jobs once,
performed nobly, quietly, decently
and far more efficiently than the monster
machines that replaced them at enormous
cost to taxpaying refuse distributors
like you and me, who wouldn’t stoop
to such a job as those men performed
in days gone by when we took them
for granted with their arthritic hands and
deformed brooms that swept so clean.
(Published online in the November 27, 2008 issue of Mannequin Envy)
Note: A pure nostalgia poem, remembering the early mornings when pal Rodney Miller and I sold newspapers – The Times Herald and The Washington Post – on opposite street corners at 18th and Columbia Road in N.W. District of Columbia. After selling out, pocketing about two bucks in jingly change each, we’d run off to junior high school, arrive sweaty but happy. One of my fondest memories – so very many, so fortunate I was – were the distinguished, quite handsome black men who unerringly swept the gutters all about us clean as a whistle. They never spoke, that I recall, just went about business like the busy business folk who bought our papers. What a cast of characters each weekday morning, from sleepy prostitutes to a dignified Supreme Court member. None were finer though than the street cleaners. Progress isn’t always measured with the right tools – those old guys really got the gutters clean. God bless ‘em.
