Vistas & Byways Review - Fall 2018
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    • Poetry
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Poetry
by Vivian Imperiale



​On the Disappearance of ​My Best Friend​


Eight years on the streets.
No one could find you.
Worse, though, you
couldn’t find yourself.
 
A mind too worn out to flee insanity
you sat hidden in bushes
or aimlessly trudged concrete paths
leading nowhere.
 
One day you lashed out
in a paranoid rage and They grabbed you
and jailed you.
But there was good in that.
Soon there was soothing talk
and medications that made connections in your brain
so the sun was the sun
and the moon was the moon—again.
 

Then twenty years of everything right— 
housing, a career,
laughter, comfort, good times.
 
Why, oh, why did you pick a day to disappear again?
You had everything
but chose to return
to nothing.
All alone—cold and confused.
Again.
 
But do you understand how friendship works?
Now we are cold and confused, too,

because we thought we knew you—  ​
but we were wrong.


​What It Really Is About​


I couldn’t take it anymore.
Walking by sad, homeless people,
barely looking at them
as I passed them by.
I wanted to be better than that
so I decided on a simple outreach plan:
I would give them granola bars.
Using my instincts,
I chose the people to approach.
I thought that my gift to them was the granola bar,
but right away I learned the truth:
 
It’s not about the granola bar.
 
No matter how hungry a person was,
what mattered more than the bar was
my looking into their eyes
and that I wasn’t telling them
to be someone more,
to go somewhere else.
I was smiling and gentle
and, in return, no matter how deep their agony,
no matter how far back
they had to travel to me
from their psychotic wanderings,
they were there for me with friendly eyes
and polite “pleases” and “thank yous”
and “your compassion means a lot.”
 
One man clung to the granola bar
as though it were a gift from heaven
in a life where he owns nothing—but despair.
Yet even so…
 
It’s not about the granola bar.
 
Our real connection became clear
when tears swelled up in his eyes
because, although he had asked nothing of me,
I came to him when he had long forgotten
what it was like for someone to see him.
 
Giving of ourselves may seem like a little thing
but it isn’t, in fact, a little thing
but a big forever thing
that can change how a person feels about the world
and, very importantly, how he feels about his own worth.
 
Those simple gestures are selfish in a way
because each time I left in awe
of how kindness survives
inside worn-out, ignored people.
Kindness waiting for a reason to glow.
 
It’s not about the granola bar.
 
It’s about talking with a person and not at a person.
It’s about giving him a moment of not being judged.
It’s about letting his humanity shine through
to light his smile that brightens both our worlds.
​
About Vivian Imperiale
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​Vivian Imperiale has a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Special Education. She is the former program director at a non-profit vocational training program for clients with psychiatric disabilities and later set up and ran the vocational rehabilitation program at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco.
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IN THIS ISSUE

FICTION

NONFICTION

POETRY

VISUAL ARTS

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​The
Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and visual arts by members of OLLI at SF State.
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​The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University​ provides material support to the Vistas & Byways volunteer staff.

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  • Contents
    • In This Issue
    • Fiction
    • Nonfiction
    • Poetry
    • Visual Arts
  • About Us
  • Contributors
  • Submissions
  • Latest V&B ISSUE