Soft White Hands

you'd think the mud was concrete, laced with arsenic,
doused in pesticides in a pool of raw sewage
the way they recoil having never gotten their hands dirty.
oh, precious ones with soft white hands and pushed back cuticles.
I'd do it myself, rhythmically brushing loose mortar mixed with
dried river mud from between flagstone that knew the
Andersons from Sweden and the Firth family with the
grocery on 15th before the City bulldozed it in the 30's.
These stones watched laundry dry over many decades.
I would wield that straight edged shovel to flake mud
off the cracked concrete floor that has felt the small
bare feet of children who now lie in their graves, their
giggles long lost to the wind that blew among the
plum and peach orchards that graced these fields, their
toes once delighting in the squishness of soft mud. 
This is the same stuff, coughed up from the river bed,
still the same softness when wet, now flaky and dry
waiting for the right hands to rhythmically brush and
shovel it away.
It's just dirt.