Lori walks through the city.
She carries kind words
instead of the Bible.
She carries a hot sauce bottle
in one of her coat pockets
in case street vender food requires it.
Lori stands on top of a fire hydrant
with her extraordinary balance.
She dispenses kind words from there.
Her kind words are so right on
that street preachers stop
to listen and ask for blessings.
One day the fire department
and three of its trucks arrived
and required use of their hydrant.
Lori was in the middle of distributing kind words
and made the decision
it was kinder to let the firemen do their work
than to finish dispensing kind words.
She jumped down from the hydrant
and sat among the street preachers
to watch the firemen work.
They put out a blaze in record time.
No one actually times and records
firemen working
when they could be watching
the flames consume the Bible shop.
copyright © 2022 Kenneth P. Gurney
Umflop 