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Home
Home is where a battered soul renews itself after spiritually plundered by the outside world; a place where anyone first goes when being hurt, sick or weary. Home is not necessarily an outwardly prosperous situation like the moated grange where the death-craving Mariana wept and withered, or the Mansion House where its Christmas feast was lavishly set and coveted in vain by idle urchins on the street.
Home is the thatched cottage where gold-laden Jack returned from the Giant's castle to which he clomb by the heavenward Beanstalk; the mean house where Bob Crachit shared a turkeyless Christmas dinner with his big family; the place a man belongs and all his memories gather round like James Taylor's West Virginia where his life is old there older than the trees.
Lying under Bridge
Nobody knows who he was, but everyone knows who he is - a beggar (I did see him beg water from a callous doorkeeper who refused him) by the foot of an overpass, a hellish place protecting him from nothing and providing him with nothing either. The poor man lies there every night, flogged by sharp wind and caustic eyes, and by day he walks out, melting into the outside world though he in his ragged clothing has lost his ability of melting.
The beggar has possessions: a greasy blanket of no use for the coming winter, a cracked bottle he scavenged from trash, and a tattered bag for hoarding food, all deposited under the overpass he calls home.
He wears a greyish-blue coat that reeks of sewage, and a pair of corduroy pants thousand-year-old. Obviously he never washes his face, and his hair is a terrible mess like tendrils of shrubs winding around a wooden pole. Supposed to be dimmed by humiliating poverty, his eyes are oddly bright and innocent as if they had never seen anything ghastly in the intervening years. Sometimes he just lies still on his back like a corpse wrapped in its flimsy shroud. Sometimes he sits up and watches the world go by, eyes glazed as if he were musing on the past. |
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发表于 2016-10-30 19:43:49
