City Woman

Cadillac Square, where by sun-lit day, moneyed
suits and pretty secretaries co-mingle with
the panhandlers, bus station drifters and cautious
tourists. This late night, a lone woman exits
her Birmingham bus clutching purse and cane
with scrub bucket knuckles and drags her old
bones through the shadowed maze of steel and
glass and marble to her Gratiot Ave. redbrick
walk-up. I watched as she diminished in the
distance beyond the brown pools of lamp lights.
A faint flickering neon rimmed her figure in blue
before she faded to black.