“Teach Us to Number Our Days”
BY RITA DOVE
In the old neighborhood, each funeral parlor
is more elaborate than the last.
The alleys smell of cops, pistols bumping their thighs,
each chamber steeled with a slim blue bullet.
Low-rent balconies stacked to the sky.
A boy plays tic-tac-toe on a moon
crossed by TV antennae, dreams
he has swallowed a blue bean.
It takes root in his gut, sprouts
and twines upward, the vines curling
around the sockets and locking them shut.
And this sky, knotting like a dark tie?
The patroller, disinterested, holds all the beans.
August. The mums nod past, each a prickly heart on a sleeve.
The first time I read this I understood that the neighborhood was poor "Low-rent balconies"and dangerous "The alleys smell of cops". I feel like this would look like Downtown LA. In the third stanza, the narrator introduces the innocence of a child. When I first read the first line on the 3rd stanza, I thought that the kid might have accidentally swallowed some type of drug because since the neighborhood was dangerous, I assumed that drugs were not uncommon there.
By the last read, I kind of saw the "blue bean" as a symbol of dreams and aspirations. Since this neighborhood can be said to be low class, they protroller in a way holds the future of the kid in his hands. If the patroller decides to stop the kid from "swallowing"his future, the child is not going to have any good type of future. The game of tic-tac-toe can symbolize the child's uncertain future.
