Counting Crosses
Counting Crosses
Yesterday as my father took me
to piano class to “tickle the ivories,”
I saw a small white wooden cross.
A red teddy bear hung on it like a little cotton-stuffed Jesus,
crucified on the grass two feet from the road.
Plastic and real flowers, dripping dismally in the gray sky’s perspiration,
lay strewn on their sides near it,
long-ago relics of a little girl’s spilt flower basket.
My father glanced over and shook his head,
so I asked him what it was.
Some teenager,
he said,
died here in a car crash.
He took a hand off the wheel and
pointed.
There are the names-more than one-four, in fact,
he said sadly,
four kids died on the asphalt right here.
I almost cried, and
when he turned away to look at the road just ahead of him,
having some visibility problems with the
frosted-over glass,
I leaned my head on the cold,
rain-streaked windows
and added my tears to the
sky’s for four children
who died and planted
a white cross and red teddy bear
in the dirt with the last of their
blood,
smeared on a windowpane.
And then, for the rest of the
ride, I counted crosses,
just for
them.