‘Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry’
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown writes for the Book Review about life during the pandemic.
I don’t know whose side you’re on,
but I am here for the people who work in grocery stores that glow in the morning
and close down for deep cleaning at night
right up the street and in cities I mispronounce,
in towns too tiny for my big black
car to quit, and in every wide corner
of Kansas where going to school means
at least one field trip to a slaughterhouse.
I want so little: another leather bound
book, a gimlet with a lavender gin, bread
so good when I taste it I can tell you
how it’s made.
I’d like us to rethink what it is to be a nation.
I’m in a mood about America today.
I have PTSD about the Lord.
God save the people who work in grocery stores.
They know a bit of glamour is a lot of glamour.
They know how much it costs for the eldest of us to eat.
Save my loves and not my sentences.
Before I see them, I draw a mole near my left dimple,
add flair to the smile they can’t see behind my mask.
I grin or lie or maybe I wear the mouth of a beast.
I eat wild animals while some of us grow up knowing what gnocchi is.
The people who work at the grocery don’t care.
They say, Thank you.
They say, Sorry,
We don’t sell motor oil anymore with a grief so thick
You could touch it.
Go on.
Touch it.
It is early.
It is late.
They have washed their hands.
They have washed their hands for you.
And they take the bus home.