The street I live on is dying

By Rudolph Lewis

There’s a summer-league basketball

court, rec center, just right up across

the street where I live, hoppers come

the sun is hot in the long evenings

But they don’t live on this street

like politicians who stay elsewhere

Down on Whitlock, on a pole, blue light

flashing across from Korean Cut-Rate

snapping me with a bottle in a brown skin

bag, boys in baggy pants & long t-shirts

they got stories of rollers & snitches

My neighbor on my right he died a year ago

My neighbor on my left just moved the other day

junk scattered in the alley out back

down a little, old man with vicious dog

houses boarded up, down by Retreat

There are no children who laugh on this street

I heard a noise down in my kitchen, one man

in the alley with a shopping cart, another at

my iron door with crow bar, bending,

I ask him what the mf he doing—he did not run

he thought the house abandoned

I said man get the fuck out my yard

The street I live on is dying

Rudy, you have really captured the "feel" of that street, the sense of decay, of the downward spiral, with details that the reader can see:  the kids is baggy pants, the guy with the shopping cart, and the one with the crowbar.  I know the Druid Hill area, which used to be filled with working class folk who had hopes & dreams.  I wonder how long it'll be before the White folk move in with their sheet rock and two by fours--or their bulldozers--and take back the neighborhood, like they're doing in Dee Cee around Florida and U Street, an area that the Black middle class abandoned, didn't want.  Gentrification is in full swing there now. -- Miriam

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For Tookie

posted 27 November 2005 /  updated 24 February 2008