I see the box before I see the men.

Its top flaps are open in praise, the contents within peering up at the heavens on a bright September afternoon. The box sits conspicuously near the bottom step to the library. The building is the largest in a network of knowledge at the university that holds more than 5.4 million volumes.

Inside those stately walls are stories by Maya, Toni, Sylvia and Emily. Inside the box are stories by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The words have been translated and interpreted, the type size reduced to fit easily in a hand, or a student’s pocket.

The men are gray-haired and smiling; they exude friendliness. Unlike most of the others in this busy section of campus, they aren’t on their way to class. They’ve passed and failed tests already, most of them not in a classroom.

A girl beside me with AirPods dangling from her ears doesn’t hear my heels clicking on the sidewalk, or the man with the gray mustache who greets us.

“Would you like a New Testament?”

I smile back but I don’t break my stride or extend my hand to receive his gift. I’m on my way to a poetry reading at an art museum during my lunch break. Around the corner from the library, two more men are also offering the tiny tomes to passersby. I don’t see anyone take a book. Most are looking at their phones.

As I walk, my mind separates and labels everything automatically. Young. Short. Stylish. Boy. Girl. Tree. Old. Black. White. Flowers. Asian. Athlete. Married. Fat. Hot. Sad. Squirrel. Leaves. Oak?

Everything has its place. I am so old to most of these kids, I think. But not as old as the men with the Bibles. This makes me feel better. My mind effortlessly carves out a place for me.

Inside the museum, I slouch in the darkened auditorium and listen to poet Tyler Mills read from her book Hawk Parable, about the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her grandfather was a soldier in one of the planes. He had a job to do, and now, so does she.

A sequence titled “Exposure” creates poetry out of survivors’ verbatim accounts.

I Could Not 

I found her tightly wedged 
from the chest down 

into fallen plaster. 
The fires were moving closer. 

I could not move her.
I placed my hands together 

as if in prayer. 
I could not let 

myself be burned alive. 
Mummy isn’t brave enough 

to stay and die with you.

Forgive me. Forgive me.
I fled.

~ Tyler Mills, from Hawk Parable

I cry in the dark for the girl, the mother, the men in the airplane. I cry for Tyler Mills and her grandfather. I think about how our soldiers were given pocket-sized New Testaments by the U.S. government during World War II. Did they save anyone? Probably.

Tyler’s poems decimate the categories, and the labels land in one pile. Victim, survivor, good, bad, tragedy. People in the air, people on the ground, people. God is here, I think. In the poems.

On my way back to work, the man with the mustache asks again.

“Would you like a New Testament?” 

I shake my head and my heels click, click, click on the sidewalk as a young woman wearing a hijab walks by on my left, a backpack slung over her petite shoulders. She is about to pass the man with the mustache. I slow my pace to hear what happens behind me.

He does not ask if she would like a New Testament.

Is that respectful? I wonder. Or dismissive? For a moment my mind swirls with assumptions and clichés. Then, just as immediately, I chastise myself for separating and characterizing so efficiently. It’s hard work, all this unlearning and unlabeling.

I bet they exchanged smiles. I bet love passed between those two tiny pieces of the same thing. And that reframing makes the real me — the me who hears the judgments, the me who rejects the labels, the me who feels the poetry — smile, too.

Yes, I would like a new testament.