Tim Bowling - sidewalks in early spring

Along the long cave walls of the city
the children chalk their days
as I chalked mine in another city,
other days. The pastel flowers
that bloom in cement, the rainbows
of the trodden earth, the letters
of first names tried for the first time
in the open air—what is recorded
under us if not a kind of history?

Our fingers and the fingers
of the dead of all the cities took
the pollen of a new expression
to the skin and made a honey
for the weary, homeward step
that would one day be ours
and is ours now, the dark
squares of pre-dawn hitched
like boxcars empty even of memory
and stretching on and on, long block
to long block, vast city to vast city
become by dusk the vivid impulse
of the race, the scritch of every tongue
the white chalk inside each hand,
the motion of what we were and are
binding us to the first art and the last.