Lost and Found

Lost and Found

The side of a highway in September,

ankle-high grass brushed with dew,

and we are in the second mile of our walk,

Two cold men, volunteers with a thankless duty,

collecting trash along the roadway.

Lugging our mostly full shoulder-slung bags,

the risen sun at our backs,

we discover that someone lost a flag –

a miniature American flag,

maybe six inches wide and four tall,

attached with staples to a thin wooden stick.

Every item found had, until this point,

faced the same destiny –

to be gripped by our dampened yellow gloves,

then plunked into the pitiless blue bags.

But now this.

My partner in sanitation,

a short and muscled man with graying

strands sneaking from below his cap,

looked at it for a moment, 

waving it a little in his hands

then continued along the shoulder

holding the patriotic emblem

between the fingers of his bag-laden hand

as we proceeded with our cleanup.

It was a cumbersome job,

or at least seemed to be,

to watch him keep the flag at full staff

while still reaching for trashy bits in the grass.

A few hundred yards later, where we paused

to tie our bags and unsettle new ones,

my companion in this lonesome job

without a word crossed the ditch and worked the flag stick

between the taut tentacles of a barbed wire fence.

Standing back, we watched the banner,

the tiny emblem of our freedom and nation,

ruffling in a morning zephyr of the plains.

Chins upheld, indivisible, we stood in reverence.

A sigh, cleared throat, the unfurling of new bags,

and we bent again to our labor.