I don’t get involved in my neighbors’ lives

Today I wanted to buy shoes, a person must take care of herself:
everything depends on that. Although I find it hard to believe,
each passerby in the street
is hungry and naked under a coat of worry,
each one of them a windmill whose blades turn endlessly around itself.
See how the beavers build their dams with such small hands,
their lips moving voicelessly above the water as if they were counting money or praying.
Look at the bees’ financial ballet—
hot from sun and sap, tiny envelopes in motion in the post office of hunger.
The earth hums and dances like a simmering stew.
Tired, I want to sit on the edge of the world, to go on strike.
But I continue onward so no one will see
the short distance between me and the homeless,
between them and the pull of the floor, a divider thinner than skin.
It’s only that they have a bigger imagination or sense of the future.
Watch out, Nurit, I say to myself,
only the dead have less ability to care for themselves,
and you can imagine how they look when they’re being removed,
slowly or quickly, like swept leaves, or eyelashes
closing in on a lack of talent for living.