You Shack, you stack of boards and loosened nails,
leaning against yourself to keep from falling to the earth.
You hovel! You place where martyrs slept
to forget fate, to hide in hollow bastions of the virgin birth
Sawdust breaks the pozzolanic ash in your foundations and
the greyed tar paper on your roof is peeling
You have no electricity, no place for sewage to escape
and when the days are short it surges to the ceiling
But never did you affect those you sheltered, did you?
Never did you impose your damage on those inside.
Never did you unburden yourself upon them,
even though your needs were always first to be denied.
Who can claim you are not therefore a noble shack
despite the tragicomedies carried out between your painted planes?
Or from your sagging ridgebeam suppose to hang any blame
because beneath it no holiday nor hearth nor beast remains?
And neither can any reasonable person deny
that you are the womb in which the thing was incubated
and before your law, there was Solomon and Hammurabi,
and by all of these you are sorely implicated.
Still, you are a dead thing, a husk, no more than the sum of parts
and responsibility is strictly a human trait,
and which of us has the more unpleasant punishment
as I lie here ‘neath the steeple and gaze on you in hate?
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