Posted on May 14, 2017
On a hill above Los Angeles
I look out over a city of windows.
This poem is barely a poem. It is a moment, a moment that produced a thought. The moment was the experience of looking out over the city from a home on Mountain View, a street on a hill in the Mar Vista (Sea View) section of Los Angeles. At dusk from this location the city spreads out to the east as a multiplicity of walls and windows.
The Spanish speaking founders of this massive urban sprawl named this expanding pueblo The City of Angels, not after the angelic behavior of the inhabitants, but after the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Angels in hopes that some of her beneficence would rub off on the population.
Miles away hidden behind glass, a man,
after washing supper dishes,
stretches out on the couch for a nap.
A woman tip toes around the room
not to wake him.
Did the Virgin Mary’s influence work its magic on the millions who live there? The poem assumes there was at least some modest success. The two unnamed persons in the poem, for instance. Their angelic deeds were not heroic, but they were offered on behalf of the well-being of another person. The man washed the supper dishes. The woman was quiet so he could nap. ,
They are among the city’s
better angels.
In his first inaugural address as president of the United States (1861) Abraham Lincoln concluded with these words:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
In the mix of angels and devils that constitute our human nature, Lincoln calls upon the fracturing nation to follow “the better angels of our nature” and avoid the probability of civil war. Among the multi-million citizens of the city of Los Angeles, there are those who express their best nature in small and daily deeds.