Cedars of Lebanon [naomi]

This town has seen better days. It is clear to me that, in its younger years, it was vibrant, pretty even. Now the buildings stand like a flock of old ladies, painted up in Sunday best. Don’t come too close or peer beneath the paint covering their naked bones, ‘cause nothing ever changes here, it just gets a face lift.

This town is strange with its opposing tides of culture, ebbing, flowing, climbing into each other. I see calico frocks, stockinged feet and hair neatly (almost permanently) pinned beneath a modern version of an outdated doily. Little girls follow the tug of their apron strings into the past. My eyes turn northwestward and I see a shirt stretched tight against the breasts of a young woman while below her waist her pants swoosh swooshing almost drowning out the sound of her children chattering two steps behind. Stone lips touch a cigarette and try, with one more drag, to soften life. Old man walks the street, never quite using the cane he won’t put down. I see Old Glory, hailing from every corner, and Puerto Rico beckoning from every other car. The stain of families sitting too long in their own sweat opposes the smell of new blood—different blood—in town. Multi-colored mannequins cross cement seas. We are different breeds, and how we collide is anyone’s guess.

Silence is hard to come by in this town. Neighbors tramp the streets marking territory between cars. The pavement pounds out their beat; I can feel it in the soles of my feet all the way up my spine: This war with no winner, these cultural tides.

If you listen, and listen well, below the sonic thrust of the streets and the shattered chatter on the sidewalks. Listen to the cedars, those silent guardians of stillness, they who deny the seasons and dance with the wind, they who know this town as it was and whose silent march of time will outlast the pounding pavement, and the peeling bones, and the lonesome call of the outbound train. They will speak and tell, for those who care to listen, of hope.