Statue of homeless man in Bergen, Norway

POEM BY TIHANA SKORIC: What the Eyes Can’t See

Last updated: April 1st, 2019

From her little office, in the skyscraper where she works, she towers over the city.

When she feels crowded in, she just takes a deep breath but it doesn’t always help.

She sits at her computer, all day long, sipping the stale coffee she bought at the train station on her way to work.

She grabs her briefcase as she hurries to make yet another four o’clock meeting.

She runs towards the elevator pleading with an angry man to hold the door, he either doesn’t hear her or, doesn’t want to know.

She waits tapping her foot impatiently, and though her feet hurt from the heels she’s worn all day, she won’t let it show.

Into the elevator, then quickly out of the glass revolving door she rushes down a crowded street, pushing her way through.

She’s delayed again at the red lights, but before they’ve turned green, she’s already on the other side.

Up ahead the bank’s building stands one hundred floors tall, and the glass windows blind her as they reflect the setting sun.

Her shoes click on the marble courtyard as she walks, the sound reminds her to push past the pain in her feet and keep an even rhythm.

Her feet are bloody and sore, but you’d never know because in those pink heels, she feels like she can take on the world.

He sees her from a block away, he knows her by her walk.

Always at the same time of day she comes his way, but all he can ever do is watch her pass him by.

He lies there on the cold marble stones with all the things he owns at his feet neatly folded in a backpack.

When she passes him, her pink heels almost step on his head and he regrets that they don’t because then he might get noticed.

As she walks past, she wears a worried smile, he tries to give her a reassuring smile but she doesn’t reply when he says “Hi.”

He laughs a little to himself for thinking that she would, because he knows he’s so far beneath her sights.

As he lies there, she takes the longest ride on the elevator to the top of the building, and she always walks with purpose, while he only dreams of living.

What neither of them knows, what their eyes can’t see, is how much they need each other’s warmth.

And while she hurries through her day she never stops to think about that boy who always lies outside the bank or, why he says hello.

And he, feeling lesser than the Earth, has no self-confidence and no self-worth to even wonder why she walks so close.

—by Tihana Skoric


Image: Statue of a Homeless Man via Shutterstock