Lookin’ for a Poet in a Park

I’ve been looking for Jonathan Igwe.

About two months ago he was living in Rancho Cienega Park in South-Central L.A., but I can’t find him now.

Could be he lives in a car or maybe he’s one of those guys who wraps himself in a blanket or old newspapers and huddles down under a tree.

Jonathan’s homeless, you see. And he’s a poet.

He wrote me last September talking about street violence and sent me a poem called “I Don’t Know.”

Don’t you ask me

Because I don’t know.

The trouble with the human race.... “

The letter was on paper torn from a notebook and ragged on the left margin.

“Isn’t it sad,” he wrote, “that we could have so much in L.A. and still be so spiritually impoverished?”

Then he said, “Gangbanging is all about money, respect and power, and believe me gangbangers are the only blacks that have all three these days.”

It was a good letter with a lot of wisdom and reality in it, in response to columns I’ve been writing on violence in L.A.

I don’t know how he saw the columns since he probably can’t afford newspapers. Maybe a Metro page blew down a road in the wind and he picked it up.

The letter was compelling enough, but his P.S. at the end was what threw me: “Sorry I can’t give you an address. Even though I am ranked in the top 2% of the best poets in America, I am homeless.”

I didn’t do anything about the letter right away because I’m the type of guy who has a tendency to put things off.

I dug a hole for a fishpond months ago with big plans to concrete it in and install a waterfall and God knows what else.

That’s as far as I got, though, and the abandoned hole still sits there staring at my conscience, slowly filling up with dirt again.

But I did keep thinking about Jonathan Igwe, wondering what his life was like hunched out there in the vast emptiness of nowhere-to-go, writing poems in a notebook.

Thinking about something, however, isn’t the same as acting on it, which probably accounts for a lot of the world’s problems. We think and we talk and we don’t get around to actually doing anything.

That notion bothered me enough to finally get me searching for Jonathan. The P.S. said he was living in the parking lot behind Rancho Cienega, so I headed there.

It’s a huge park just off La Brea near where flames lit the city six months ago. There’s a gigantic playing field, a separate running track, playthings for the kids and picnic benches.

I wandered around for a long time looking for someone I thought might be either homeless or a poet, not quite knowing what I was looking for.

I don’t know if Jonathan Igwe is white or black, short or tall, old or young, just that he’s got a lot of questions bouncing around in his soul.

Why are we killing each other

Why the senseless bloodshed

Why the persistent feeling of insecurity ...

“I am writing to you in order to make my contribution as a poet,” he wrote. “I still believe we can appeal to the human beings in these killers.”

He was talking about street-killers, the demonic creatures that blast you into hell for no other reason than a dare or an initiation.

I kept wondering as I looked for Jonathan how he could sing of the human spirit and the goodness in us when he’s out there somewhere without even a place to live.

What kind of guy is it who can be homeless and possibly half-starving and still not view us with a hatred that consumes his total being?

“You ever hear of someone named Jonathan Igwe who writes poetry?” I asked a man curled up in a ragged blanket on a strip of lawn behind the parking lot.

He clung to that rag of a thing like a baby with a security symbol and just kind of shook his head no.

I asked the same question of a homeless woman sitting at a picnic table watching some kids play soccer. She had a dead look in her eyes and didn’t even look up to acknowledge me.

I asked a big guy feeding pigeons and some kids playing catch and a teen-ager who was probably a gangbanger himself and wanted money. Another wanted work. Another just wanted to be left alone. None of them knew about poets.

Don’t ask me

Because I don’t know

The trouble with the human race. Today.

I never did find Jonathan Igwe, but I’m still hoping he’ll write again or call or something.

But even if he doesn’t, I know he’s out there, walking long roads toward distant horizons, asking questions and singing about redemption.