"The Purgatory Players"
by Chad Gardner
The adults sit and listen.
Guitars on the small stage sing the tight harmonies of old
practiced gospels.
Their voices bear the scratch marks from last night's smoke-filled halls
but still seep out with the soft ease of mastery.
We pass the tip jar down the aisle like on the Sunday mornings
of our youth, also practiced,
collecting money for the area food bank.
On the floor sits my son,
oblivious and yet more attuned than any of us,
drawing circles on the headlines:
another sentencing
another attempt at diplomacy
another attack
another failure
now covered by the wheels of a car
or maybe the endless path of a ceiling fan blade,
a cloud of bubbles or colored plastic balls.
The innocence of his youth rests like a garnish on the simple hopes
rising in those chords and crinkled bills,
the hope that we still have a reason to do good work,
that a difference might be made.
Sunday morning in an Austin coffee shop
caught between the ache to do more
the need to sit and listen
and the quiet doodling of a two-year-old.