Sleeping on the bus.

How we drift in the twilight of bus stations, how we shrink in overcoats as we sit, how we wait for the loudspeaker to tell us when the bus is leaving, how we bang on soda machines for lost silver, how bewildered we are at the vision of our own faces in white-lit bathroom mirrors.

How we forget the bus stations of Alabama, Birmingham to Montgomery, how the Freedom Riders were abandoned to the beckoning mob, how afterwards their faces were tender and lopsided as spoiled fruit, fingers searching the mouth for lost teeth, and how the riders, descendants of Africa and Europe both, kept riding even as the mob with pleading hands wept fiercely for the ancient laws of segregation.

How we forget Biloxi, Mississippi, a decade before, where no witnesses spoke to cameras, how a brown man in army uniform was pulled from the bus by police when he sneered at the custom of the back seat, how the magistrate proclaimed a week in jail and went back to bed with a shot of whiskey, how the brownskinned soldier could not sleep as he listened for the prowling of his jailers, the muttering and cardplaying of the hangmen they might become. His name is not in the index; he did not tell his family for years. How he told me, and still I forget.

How we doze upright on buses, how the night overtakes us in the babble of headphones, how the singing and clapping of another generation fade like distant radio as we ride, forehead heavy on the window, how we sleep, how we sleep.

Martin Espada is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, "City of Coughing and Dead Radiators," and the forthcoming, "Imagine the Angels of Bread," published by W.W. Norton. He is also the editor of "Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination," from Curbstone Press. His awards include two NEA Fellowships, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Espada teaches in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.