He wakes within subways. I rise from bed. Damp floors soil his soles. Rugs ease mine. I pick and choose among possessions for what I’ll need today: a notebook, pen and wallet in a parka’s leftward pocket with my cellphone on the right. A crunched recycled shopping bag for groceries curls in my black cloth glove. All that he’s assembled along his arduous life’s journey stuff a wire shopping cart from which his duck’s gait grows. He ascends the subway stairs as I descend from a brick building’s second floor.

We surprise ourselves by crossing paths on a crowded Brooklyn corner where his wind-scarred, rain-sloshed face as if a sailor on a deck aims gimlet eyes at mine. I, with laser-like precision through an eyeglass lens, perceive his small frame, eager face. An invisibility cloak must shield him as if in a Harry Potter scene since hellbent tunnel-eyed commuters scurry to the train where they’ll ignore the child who trails her migrant mother selling candy up the aisle. The city’s underworld features apathy and need as masses travel to the gleaming corporate towers that are shrines to corporate greed. I surmise my friend is younger than he looks, the toll of life’s travails. I am his momentary haven as the human flood erupts.

“My name is Mike, and welcome,” I declare, “and yours?” His plaintive whisper is “Jerome.”

A messiah may grace us all while dressed in common clothes, our major faith traditions teach but would people heed its call if that should come to pass? Christ’s Sermon on the Mount call to aid the poor accords with alms giving during Ramadan and is one among the Thirteen Attributes of Jews.

I am not a doctor nor do I know most things, but I diagnose a contagious social malady that has a multiplicity of symptoms that no free vaccine can cure; consumed with chores of micro-life inside jobs or homes that add seething anger to what we carry out the door, plunges for departing trains although another comes, cars racing in and out of highway lanes risking lives to have a thrill, striding briskly straight ahead on sidewalks forcing others to the side, condescension to the cashier at the market born of needless rush.

Must the “still small voice” speak from higher settings to arouse the “better angels of our nature” that wise Lincoln’s mind perceived?

Has the individualist culture trend that raises “building brands” past “common good” made selfish greed prevail among the erstwhile political elites and corporate chieftains while we concern ourselves with treading water through the trials of working days?

Jerome’s heart of gold is as a trinket in an apathetic land, but his presence teaches us with its eyes and mouth and hands.

“Eradicating poverty preoccupied the ancient Hebrew prophets,” a Rabbi’s course on Zoom imparts as I wonder who in the little boxes will take that note to heart. I now lack the platforms that once amplified my voice through decades working in the realms of government and schools. At least my supple fingers in the dike have meaning as I grant a moment’s grace and ample funds to feed my friend. His eyes fill at the gift as his gratitude for the act arouses tears in mine.

Noting that I’ve dropped one weathered glove, I excuse myself to find it resting between a salesman’s stand with varied baseball hats and hoodies, and an aged city tree. Jerome meanwhile stands his ground amid the masses like a captain on a deck. Does he intend a further destination across the arc of day? Leaning to insert my wrinkled hand in glove, I note his claw-like palms and fingers have been stiffened by the cold.

I yield my gloves while sensing that our parting is at hand. The pocket of my blue jeans as always holds a folded loose-leaf page with scribbled poem drafts and task lists that comprise a structure for the day. Tearing off a portion, I write how he can reach the soup kitchen where I was once a three-year volunteer. Folks there will fill his shopping cart with food enough for morning, noon and night.

How many more among us do our privileged lives ignore?

“Each time we feed pucks to teammates for a goal, we donate to a ‘feed the hungry’ program,” is a hockey star’s remark at intermission. I don’t begrudge the millions that world class athletes make nor teams’ lavish sums from hundred dollar “cheap seats,” arena concessions and the merch. But if those who calculate the budget to discern the bottom line would observe what lies beyond the igloo, would they give a little more?

Do we fear that poverty looms for all of us amidst the alienating climate of the authoritarian approaches that make democracy decay? Is that why public parlance lauds rare rags to riches tales? Rather than the “one’s own bootstraps” admonition might we sound a trumpet so that we’ll heed Lincoln’s timeless conscience call?

Awaken from your slumber, better angels! Spread symbolic wings around the shoulders of those who suffer in the cold!

The final lines title reflect this closing passage of President Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, delivered on the eve of Civil War: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”