Leave the sidewalk with its early morning crush of people hurrying to get from here to there. They rush to someplace or no place, eyes cast down, unseeing, missing the rubbish, dramas large and small and scenes of careless beauty that clutter city streets. Turn onto the path that traces slowly through the park between trees waltzing in the wind and flowers nodding bright-colored heads. Take a seat on a bench. You’re in time for the show.
Look around. You can’t miss seeing stone archways and walls sparkling with iridescent paint, sprayed in arcs of color creating forms known only to the artists’ imagination. Graffiti. Street art. The park buildings’ bare cinder-block walls are tempting canvasses that feed the imaginations of artists in the rough. Youths with something to say to a world mostly deaf and blind to them. They shout it in wild pictures that are there in the morning and scrubbed clean by nightfall. The artists will return in the dark and begin again. They do not give up.
The workers who care for the park look at the graffiti and see a job to do. They get out their cleaning solution and brushes and go to work. Day after day the push and pull between artists and workers goes on. The workers’ jobs put food on the table for their families. Day after day they persevere.
And what about you, sitting on the park bench. What so you see? Art provokes thought and gives nourishment to the soul. You aren’t required either to love or hate art. Just know that beneath the scourges and victories of human history art endures.
poetrybyheart.me 
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