Walk/Don't Walk

There's new blue paint

splattered in the crosswalk.

I don't know if its representation

of where Eula Long was hit,

or if its random pigmentation.

Fifty feet of pedestrian yo-yo,

the body whistles by,

an elder loon voice

broken by inattentive steel.

I heard the story

just a week before she died.

A lithographer, Eula went

to poetry seed when blind hands

refused paper and pen.

More barbed than the bark

of Saint Burbank's roses, her crone croon 

recorded "Cats and Doggerel",

just eight years short

of a very personal

century.