Safeway Entrance

Here’s the first poem from my index card boxes for poems that start with the letter S:

Safeway entrance—

a homeless man wipes dry

a rain-sparkled cart

I first wrote this poem on 12 December 2002 in Redmond, Washington, with revisions on 15 March 2004 and 28 November 2014. I submitted it in 2005 to the Kaji Aso Haiku Contest run by the Kaji Aso Studio and the Boston Haiku Society, and it was returned in May of that year. I then sat on the poem for nine years, but sent it to Bottle Rockets in November of 2014, having it returned the following month. I sat on the poem for another six years and then tried sending it to Shamrock in Ireland in 2020, without luck. I next tried the British Haiku Society members’ anthology for 2020, again with no luck. I probably should have just retired the poem, but instead, I sent it to Geppo, which publishes whatever poems members send, and they published it in late 2020.

I’m not surprised that this poem had challenges in finding a home, because poems about homeless people are hard to do well. In fact, I’m generally wary of most poems about beggars or the homeless, because they too often employ an “unearned emotion,” as Paul O. Williams put it in one of his essays. And maybe that’s the case here with my poem. Throwing a homeless person into a haiku can too easily be a cheap emotion-grab, even if that’s not the intention. And yet I still wrote this poem—and persisted, on and off, to get it published.

I’ve forgotten the circumstances, but I may have seen exactly what the poem describes, or at least what the last two lines describe. I’ve certainly known homeless people to wipe down the handles of wet shopping carts. Are they trying to guilt others into giving them some kind of payment? It's more industrious than simply begging for money. However, most grocery chains such as Safeway typically have policies forbidding any panhandling or loitering at their entrances, so maybe I imagined that detail, making up the setting of Safeway in hopes of giving the poem locational clarity. But it’s probably not authentic that this would take place at a chain grocery store, due to their regulations. The detail that feels more accurate is that a homeless person might wipe down wet shopping carts for a bit of a payment, and it seems effective that those lines imply that it’s done to solicit money without the poem saying so. But even then, the poem feels like a manipulation, as so many poems about the homeless do. We’re supposed to feel sorry for the poor homeless person. As I’ve written in “Making the Poem Personal,” “Appropriating someone else’s misfortune often creates a predictable emotion in the reader, but it’s mostly unearned. It’s a cheap trick, just as photographing a kitten or puppy doesn’t necessarily make the photograph excellent, no matter how cute the subject is.” I clearly have mixed feelings about this poem, and would be less inclined to write it now, more than two decades after I did. Maybe it works for some readers, but the subject is perhaps tired for others, as it is for me.

—26 May 2025 (previously unpublished)