Poem by Billye Okera

FOUR WALLS CAN'T HOLD ME TONIGHT

Four Walls can’t hold me tonight
Of course, they never have:
A slab of stone hardly a salve
For lone hands reaching into trash
 For a pitiable stash of food
Enough to make it through
  Unfettered and unchained
Called out of name for just wanting
A drink, a touch, and not much else prerequisite.
 
Four walls can’t hold me tonight
My flight in air
A safer fare for folk
Anxious for a place to just lay down
And not found sullied by morning.
  And Not found blighted by morning
 By man-contrived live viruses
Eschewing the virtue of open space
Lacing homeless man
  With menace-mangled death. 
 
It is because I’m homeless
It is because I hunger
It is because my clothes hang about me
  In shreds.  And the dread you’d feel
Stepping into my shoes
Crying my blues
And losing a piece of yourself
  To call me friend.
 
Four walls can’t hold me tonight
  And won’t
As the earth decries the sight
Of me, loosely sheltered under K-Street Bridge
And you safely snuggled under coverlet
  Of your feather bed. 

Billye Okera has been writing poetry since the age of seventeen.  Considering herself a Folk-Performance Poets, she is the author of two books The Mourners’ Bench, and The Days of Me and God.  At seventy, she has several other projects for publication within the next year.  She is the mother of three, and grandmother of eight.  She resides in Ft. Washington, MD.

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