The subway trains of Toronto are a temporary home for the city’s homeless, addicted and mentally ill. In the past two weeks, I’ve seen a man in a wheelchair travelling up and down the carriages asking for cash, which no one seems to carry any more.  A beautiful young girl, probably not out of her teens, was drifting along, asking everyone for ‘a dollar, just a dollar’. One woman told her she was too pretty to be addicted to crack, and the girls shriek of frustration could be heard halfway down the train. A bowed over, grey-faced man hunched in a corner, playing his phone out loud. On the streets, people are sleeping on the subway grates for warmth. People leave them coffee and sandwiches. One man is barefoot and has left his surgical boot on the pavement next to him, along with an empty cat carrier.

There are plenty of homeless people in London, but it is very visible here in Toronto, and I wonder who, if anybody, is looking out for these people? There are shelters and hostels for sure, but people seem so fragile and vulnerable out here on the streets. I am reminded that when I worked in a night shelter, the average life expectancy for a person who was homeless was 43. years old.

No answers, but here’s a poem….

Homeless

By Juliet Kono

My son lives on the streets.
We don’t see each other much.
Like a mother who puts white lilies
on the headstone of a dead child,
I put money into his bank account,
clothes into E-Z Access storage
and pretend he’s far away—
at a boarding school, or in a foreign country.
Nights, I dream fairy tales about him.
I dream he becomes a prince,
scholar or warrior who rescues me
from sorrow, the way he rescued me
when he was a child and said,
“Mommy, don’t cry,” and brought tea
into the room of his father’s acrimony—
brave, standing tall in the forest
fire of his father’s scorn. I wake
to the empty sound of wind in the trees.
He says he wants to live with me.
I say I can’t live with him—
boy whose words crash like branches in a rain storm.
Nothing can hold him in,
the walls of a house too thin.
Back home, I had seen
the “study-hard-so-you-don’t-become-like-them”
street bums on Mamo Street,
and he’s like them.
These days, in order to catch a glimpse of him,
I circle the city. One day,
I see him on his bike.
People give him wide berth,
the same way birds avoid power lines,
oncoming cars or trees.
I park on a side street.
Wild-eyed, he flies the block
as if in a holding pattern.
Not of my body, not of my hopes,
he homes in on what can’t be given or taken away.