Push the Car brother! a poem by Thomas Rogers Muyunga Mukasa

Push The Car Brother!

A Cesar Chavez look-a-like, breaking a sweat,
he is pushing a battery-dead car, with a pant,
it stalled as it negotiated a steepness,
the co-driver is an aged man with a wrinkled full moon face,

Hey brother, come give a push, he yells,
Por favor, the battery is dead, he calls,
come, come, come, hurry, hurry,
he direly begs me as he gestures in a flurry,
 I reach for the engine hood and get a grip.

I push the car with his help, something amiss,
I ask him to get in the car, behind the wheel,
get in the car, get in the car, you need to crank it,
I continue telling him, he fears abandonment,
you brave man? He asks incredulously.

Yes, I assure him and thus we got the engine running,
thank you brother, thank you brother,
de nada I replied as they sped off, 
I got back to my side of the street,
I mused at the wonderful ways our lives meet.

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Thomas Rogers Muyunga Mukasa (pen name: Tom Mukasa), currently lives in San Francisco, CA. There he is attached to the UCSF HIV division's Community Advisory Board as a volunteer reviewer. He has worked for over 15 years with the marginalized and people living with HIV/Aids/TB in Africa. He also spent most of his time training and following up 152 groups he helped organize into what he termed the 'anti-poverty' class. The 'anti-poverty' class is that class a step or two shy of middle-class. Three greatest moments he recalls were a child headed family able to successfully pay for the land and house their late parents had left behind. They were to be evicted but it did not happen. The children went on to complete high school. The second moment was of a mother living with HIV establishing a chicken poultry farm 8 miles outside of Kampala, Uganda. She saw all her four children complete university. The third was of a woman in her late 20's who havin
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