To the teenager who tackled the Asian American
taking out his garbage, who screamed
the words, kung flu, spittle flying
from your crooked mouth: Last night the old man
you punched in the face again and again,
turned eighty-four. His great-granddaughter,
aged nine, wrote a birthday poem. She read it to him
from her pink bedroom while he sat in his kitchen,
a thousand miles away. He had never been so happy,
even as a boy. Today, his glasses are broken,
his elbows and knees bloody. There are holes
in his carefully creased trousers, his good
jacket. You never looked back, just kept walking
down the street where the old man lived
for forty years, as if the sidewalk belonged to you—
while the father, grandfather, great-grandfather
you left lying on the ground, watched through
swollen eyes, a pair of clouds float
across the sky like swans.