A box spring on a skateboard is not what you expect to find at the center of a biblical echo, and that mismatch is where Nathaniel S. Rounds's "Care Package" gets its energy. Two women, Ruth and Naomi, travel from the north end of a city to a place called "the city of Habitation," carrying their bed with them. In the Bible's Book of Ruth, the two are a widow and her mother-in-law who stay loyal to each other through hardship. The poem never retells that story, but the names bring its sense of devotion with them. The "parted waters" they cross may recall the sea opening in Exodus, though that is an inference from the phrase. Here the miracle is a bridge over a river, and the promised land is a community garden.
The title does a lot of quiet work. A care package is normally something sent to you from far away. In this poem the women are the package, and they deliver it themselves, by hand, on wheels meant for a teenager. Everything they use is scavenged or grown: a discarded box spring, a "rocky patch," and a mattress made of "tall grass / And forget-me-nots." That last flower is a good choice. Its name is a plea against being overlooked, and it fits a poem about people the city would prefer not to notice.
Against them the poem sets the "penthouse dwellers / And false front fellers," who "Dropped tea cups of acid / Over hoi polloi." The pairing of "dwellers" and "fellers" is the poem's one obvious rhyme, and it sounds a bit sing-song and sneering, as if the poem were mocking the people it describes. The image of tea cups is sharper still. Tea cups suggest politeness, privilege and afternoon manners, yet what pours from them is acid. Cruelty from above is made to look refined. "Hoi polloi" literally means "the many," and the poem lets the rich use their own condescending phrase for everyone else. The preposition "Over" also runs through the poem: the women push over the bridge, the box spring sits over rock, and the acid falls over the crowd. One small word covers crossing, shelter and attack.
After the acid, the poem does not give the women a reply. There is no protest and no speech. Naomi "tended to blighted fruit trees / Grafting new branches to the old," and Ruth "wove blankets / Of protection from the wind." Grafting joins new growth to damaged stock, and weaving joins thread into something that can shelter a body. Both are slow, patient, repairing acts, and the verbs are plain and unhurried. The free verse is just as spare. The lines are short, the punctuation is almost absent, and there is no regular rhythm or end rhyme to dress the story up. The calm, matter-of-fact telling makes the women's work feel steadier than the violence above them.
The last two lines change the voice. "Some conclusions based upon the evidence at hand" sounds like a lab report or a court ruling, a dry formal register that suddenly treats the story as a case that has been tested. The two conclusions are parallel in form: "Homespun care is difficult to tear" and "The honest-faced are difficult to break." "Homespun" links back to Ruth's weaving, and "tear" belongs to cloth. "Break" moves from fabric to people. "Honest-faced" answers "false front," since a false front is a facade painted to look more solid than what stands behind it, while an honest face hides nothing. Even the pun in "at hand" works, because the evidence is literally handmade. The claims are also modest. The poem says "difficult," not "impossible." It offers no triumph, only a realistic faith in endurance.
That restraint is what makes the poem matter. It takes an ancient story of loyalty and sets it among skateboards, penthouses and corroded streets, and it suggests that care is a kind of infrastructure, built from scraps by people with no power. In a few short lines it sets gentleness against contempt and lets the gentleness win by lasting.