We sing a swan song with the woman under the only tent left
in the parking lot of North Market once filled with famers’ tents.
Drifting from tent to tent has been over for a long time,
since developers decided condos would be more profitable.
Gone are the Saturday mornings tasting the sweetest melons,
and chewing the most delicate pastries,
and buying produce far fresher than that in any grocery.
Other famers left long ago.
Where, for now, we do not know.
They were promised a nearby lot, still empty,
where progress is sure to follow.
They seem to have fled to more stable sites
where they have set up their tables before it gets light,
and their trucks do not have so far to go
from their fields and farms and hollows.
Trenches are being dug around the perimeter
and still one woman stays on, to our delight.
We sing her swan song with her
over the dead buried beneath this plot long ago.
A cemetery where African-Americans and immigrants
to a new country were buried and forgotten,
even their names left to rot unknown.
Now, developers promise removal will be handled properly,
when nothing seems proper at all to me.
This is progress. I hear it. I feel it. I sing it.
It is the swan song we have all come to know.
annarino writes 