Please read the author's notes first.

On the piers where the city takes its trash
to be hauled away by the great garbage scows,
(to hide ugly waste we pay cold, hard cash)
lives a poet who's fashioned a cardboard house.

He lives in the stench of what we've thrown away
with his wife and his poems and dreams,
writing beautiful lines amidst the decay
of a world that is not what it seems.

Once we invited the tired and the poor
to enter our cities and stake their claim.
We asked the homeless to enter our door,
we showed them the way with Liberty's flame.

Now they are chased from the steps where they lie,
superfluous people for whom we've no use.
Averting our eyes, we go bustling by,
not wanting to see our human refuse.

But the poet who lives on the garbage pier,
until he is chased to some other place,
refuses to be one who disappears -
his words give the homeless a human face.

He writes of the bounty others have shared,
those few who have chosen to not bustle by.
Though he could fill volumes with words of despair,
this poet eschews lamentation's loud cry.

He writes of a summer once spent by the lake -
how was your childhood different from this?
What's happened to us that we can forsake
him? Deny him? Ignore him? Dismiss?

If justice rolls down like the waters,
what will it do when it reaches the pier?
Will it swallow the stench as it ought to,
commanding compassion to reappear?

He lives on a pier where we dump our trash,
where the waters run murky and cold.
May the waters of justice soon be unleashed
and the words of the poet be told.