Outside the Blue Nile "Can you spare seven cents?" I drop two quarters into his paper cup, & he runs after me, saying, "Man, I can't take this. I don't want to get rich." I notice the 1st Cav. patch on his fatigue jacket. He smells like he slept in a field of mint. He says that he's Benedict the Moor. Of course, I've never heard of the fellow. Two days later, I spot him outside Cody's Bookstore & reach into my pocket, fingering the pennies. He says, "I'm not begging today, brother. I'm just paying penance." He goes back to scrubbing the sidewalk with a wirebrush. His black & white mutt stands there; she guards him at night while he sleeps under a crown of stars. I find what I'm looking for at the Berkeley Library. He was born in Sicily on the estate of Chevalier de Lanza at San Fratello, the son of African slaves. He sold the lumbering oxen he'd labored years to buy, gave the money to the poor, & followed Father Lanza, pledging a Lenten vow. After the caves in the mountains near Palermo, he went to live in a rocky cell on Mount Pellegrino where the Duke of Medina-Coeli visited & built him a chapel. All the titles at his feet, Benedict the Moor rejected. He couldn't read or write, but recited biblical passages for days. Wearing just a few leaves, he predicted the death of Princess Bianca, made the sign of the cross to give the blind sight. Here was a man who hid in a thicket from a crowd's joy. The Duchess of Montalvo bowed often before him, but she never saw his eyes. "Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit," were his last words. Three months later, I sit in The Blue Nile eating with my hands, folding pieces of spicy chicken into spongy white bread thin as forgiveness, knowing that one hand is sacred & the other is used to clean oneself with leaves or to clutch a dagger. No one ever touched Benedict the Moor's hands. Not even the Duchess. They kissed the hem of his habit. In Palermo, the senate burned fourteen torches of white wax in his honor. When I step out under Berkeley's cool stars, I see the face I thought lost in the Oakland Hills when eucalyptus created an inferno. I walk up to him, fingering a nickel & two pennies. He says, "Can you spare three cents?" -- Yusef Komunyakaa