Election Day

The seventh of November. Election Day.

At the Northwestern High School gym, voters line up—

polite and quiet, as if they had entered a church;

As if the polling booths were confessionals

to which they have come to be shriven for public sins.

In the classrooms, the teaching of history has stopped

for the moment. History itself has taken over,

Not in the form of generals and battles and laws,

but the familiar shapes of mothers, fathers, grandpas,

Feeble aunts, bundled against the outside wind;

tired of the distracting speeches, distrusting speeches.

They enter the booths unsmiling. The citizen’s work

is serious, almost like the work of making a soul--

Serious even in the Northwestern High School gym,

with its shiny wood floor and odor of young sweat.

With their delicate hands, they fulfill someone else’s

dream; create and rectify; endow and make endure.

The tensions of power do not touch them: they live

simply, weaned on the hard crust of powerlessness.

Up the street St. Margaret’s carillion tolls nones.

The voters, one by one, open the booths’ curtains.

Finished, they leave the gym, feeling clean; drive off

into the autumn twilight, headed for home--

To dinner and the slow arrival of returns: to which

they will listen in soft, unconscious togetherness,

Finding, in all those millions, whispers of themselves.