The Ballad of Orange and Grape

After you finish your work
 After you do your day
 After you've read your reading
 After you've written your say —
 You go down the street to the hot dog stand,
 One block down and across the way.
 On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century.
 Most of the windows are boarded up,
 The rats run out of a sack —
 Sticking out of the crummy garage
 One shiny long Cadillac;
 At the glass door of the drug-addiction center,
 A man who'd like to break your back.
 But here's a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose and pink, too.
 Frankfurters, frankfurters sizzle on the steel
 Where the hot-dog-man leans —
 Nothing else on the counter
 But the usual two machines,
 The grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,
 I face him in between.
 A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on walking.
 I watch the man as he stands and pours
 In the familiar shape
 Bright purple in the one marked ORANGE
 Orange in the one marked GRAPE,
 The grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE
 And orange drink in the GRAPE.
 Just the one word large and clear, unmistakable, one each machine.
 I ask him: How can we go on reading
 And make sense out of what we read? —
 How can they write and believe what they're writing,
 The young ones across the street,
 While you go on pouring grape into ORANGE
 And orange into the one marked GRAPE —?
 (How are we going to believe what we read and what we write and we hear and we say and we do?)
 He looks at the two machines and he smiles
 And he shrugs and smiles and pours again.
 It could be violence and nonviolence
 It could be black and white women and men
 It could be war and peace or any
 Binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.
 Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don't do.
 On a corner in East Harlem
 Garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,
 Forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,
 Misery, withered hope,
 A man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE
 And orange into the one marked GRAPE,
 Pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.