Do, re, mi

Sitting quietly in Quaker Meeting, it occurred to me
that honesty is one of the luxuries
of privilege. It was a question of safety
for kids I worked with who didn’t have the immunity
to risk the truth. Immunity came from money.
In Cockney slang that’s, “Bread and honey.”
“Dough” in U.S. argot since the nineteenth century,
as in, “If you don’t have the do, re, mi”—
that bitter beautiful anthem sung by Woody Guthrie
that warned California-bound, economic refugees
to turn around and head back home to Tennessee
or Texas. What to tell when to whom is about strategy,
not honesty. To confuse the two misses how poverty
works & the skill that’s required to sidestep calamities.