Some Poems
From The Rwanda Poems: Voices and Visions from the Genocide
Some Kept Laboring up the Mountain
Some kept climbing the mountain
to where the mother of God
had been seen, prophesizing,
The valleys will be covered in blood.
The rivers will be clogged
with corpses.
Someone approaches me
on a street in Kigali and says,
The genocide.
A grenade.
My mind
is not
right.
The vacancy
in the eyes
of those who killed
everyone they could.
The vacancy in the eyes
of those who lost
everyone they could.
Some brought their older sons
to help them kill neighbors
in the swamps.
Some brought their younger sons
to watch them kill neighbors
in the forests.
**
THE MEMORIAL AT THE MIRAMBI TECHNICAL
SCHOOl
The women and children were inside.
It was the rainy season.There was no space
in the schoolrooms for everyone. I was with the men
in the rain, throwing stones at the genocidaires,
who were waiting for the soldiers.
The army, militia, and villagers attacked us.
I was shot in the head.
–
Under a pile of bodies I pretended to be dead.
The Caterpillar truck lifted me up
with the corpses and dropped me
in the mass grave. I lay with the dead
one day and one night. I had eaten nothing
–
for twelve days. You see the bullet hole
in my forehead? I snuck out of the grave
at night. I was thirty-eight.
I had a wife and a son. I went to the forest.
I hid during daylight.
I walked for three nights
to Burundi.
–
Each day I remember.
Each night I dream.
–
It took two days
to kill everyone.
–
I am the only one
of 50,000 who escaped
from here.
–
The living refuse to say
where they buried the dead.
They said no one is buried here.
I showed the RPF where the graves are.
–
There are so many stories
I would tell
if I were a writer.
–
*
–
Tell them.
I will write them
for you, I say. Give me $40,
he snaps. He stomps his feet.
He snorts. He agrees
to take no money.
He makes sounds in his throat and kicks
like a donkey, at the most harmless questions.
He stares out the visitor center’s plate glass window into the rain.
He moves an index finger in angry circles.
If I think about what happens I go crazy.
He stands in a huff
and vanishes
into the rain.
–
*
–
To create the Marambi Genocide Memorial,
they opened just one mass grave
on the first anniversary of the killings.
They removed 1,800 of the dead, coated them
in white lime preservative, and set them
in classrooms, where most had died. A guide unlocked
four rooms for me. Standing just outside,
he jangled his keys,
hoping I would be brief
so he could return
to his conversation.
–
*
–
Two small girls are placed
so they are almost kissing.
The face of one, above her teeth,
is blown apart. One hand rests on the side
of her classmate.
–
The lower ribs
of a perplexed-looking seven year old
are gone. His abdomen torn apart,
his feet broken off
at his ankles.
–
A stench like spoiled meat
fills the classrooms
despite the lime.
=
The mouth of a two year old
is open in a scream,
an arm outstretched
to push something away from him.
–
A small boy tries
to protect his head
with his elbow.
–
A woman wears a pagne
that is still blue, like the sky.
–
A woman’s lips are drawn,
teeth barely parted,
as if starting to say something.
–
A woman wears just panties,
pulled to one side, exposing nothing but the hole
where they hacked her hip apart.
–
An infant has a red cloth rag
wrapped around what is left
of her head.
–
Small fingersof small children.
–
Small hips
of young girls.
–
The pretty uplift
of a six year old’s
small nose almost makes it look like she died
in peace.
–
A woman’s mouth is wide open in a scream,
her eye sockets blown apart.
–
A girl’s throat slit
to her vertebrae.
–
A twelve-year-old brings his chin
to his chest.
–
The half-open mouth
of a small girl in an oval
of surprise.
–
Above here, the terraced hills
are green with corn,
tea, and sorghum.
The comfort of the immense banana-tree leaves
that fill the small front yards
of scattered adobe cottages.
–
A baby goat tied to a tree
strains toward uneaten grass.
–
On the other side of the stone wall
marking the memorial’s boundaries,
the eldest of five young children calls out,
Mazungu. Mazungu. Stranger.
Give me your pen.The others repeat
Un cadeau. Un cadeau. Donnez-moi
l’argent, Monsieur. “Tell me,” I ask,
–
“What happened here?
Why are these people dead? You live right here
and do not know
why so many children
are dead?”
–
I do not know, one repeats. I do not know. His smile
is wide and dumb. Their parents
stare from a spot behind their small house.
Across the valley, calls of farm animals
mix with those of children playing.
–
If you take in too much, you will go crazy,
Emmanuel told me. He lost both parents.
His mother’s body was eaten by animals.
He lived a month in the forest alone
–
when he was fourteen,
militias and villagers every day
hunting down survivors.
–
I live on hope
for the future,
Serge, a friend I made
at the Kigali memorial tells me,
I do not know
where the hope comes from,
but I live on it
because there is nothing
but to go on, and to go on
is to continue when there is nothing
to live for
but hope.
**
–
Andrew Kaufman reading from “Arriving in Kibuye, Rwanda” and “Echoes in Kigali”:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cR-r8xARTDLbaucWr6K-EZYgTvTuSMs5/view?usp=sharing .
–
**
Small Money
Since the largest banknotes (90 cents)
are hard to find, the available denominations
(18, 9, and 4 1/2 cents)
are worn so thin they stick to each other
in the humidity and tear when moist
like Kleenex. The pictures —
lions, chimpanzees, and the current dictator —
–
are effaced and smudged, visible
as blotches of darker grime. Wadded together,
the money smells like the fruit and vegetable
market,
–
like sweat, spoilage, and waste.
Its scent is between earthy and nauseating —
an open sewer with a trickle
of brown fluid — or a shanty’s
tiny front yard, with toddlers in torn clothes.
The banknotes are not the red of the soil,
dirt roads, and village footpaths, but the dark gray
–
of cooking fires, the black of decades-old
engine parts, and the grime on the skin
of egg-sized potatoes, blackened by dirt
from the floors of buses and packed bush taxis.
In the quantity needed to buy a day’s food
for a woman and several children, the small money,
–
wrapped in plastic bags,
smells like the effluence from goats’ intestines
as they are weighed, bagged, and paid for.
If you want to visit, keep in mind
immigration will not accept its own currency
for the $30 visa you get at the border.
–
In the half-kilometer no-man’s land
between the country you’ve left
and the one you’re going to,
small boys grab at your clothes
and press to carry hour luggage
for small money. Victims of polio, leprosy,
–
landmines, rape victims evicted by heir husbands
because they were raped, and children orphaned ,
abandoned, or pretending to be
congregate at the gate you pass through, which is
held open
by a cord tied to a rusting
eight-cylinder truck engine,
hoping for even the smallest
amounts of small money. If sullen, broken, or
paralyzed
had a color and texture, it would be that of these
bills.
They are the shade of the plight
ofa twenty-year-old mother of four,
taken and kept as a sex slave by the Interahamwe
because there was no money, not even small
money,
the night they came to her village. But mostly the
day-to-day
–
barely visible smudges from a zillion sets of fingers
through which the money passes
turn it dark as the night market in Bukavu,
where a few thousand francs passed through my
hands
and vanished under the blouse
of an old lady who had sold me some beans,
and a few thousand more slid into the small palm
of a young girl selling yams
spread on a ground cloth on the dirt
at what seemed to me
the going price.
**
Sainte Famille Church in Kigali
–
Women, mostly old, take their turns
approaching the confession booth,
gingerly, as if afraid
to break the silence
under the high
vaulted roof.
–
They walk toward the thick royal-blue curtain
as I would labor up a mountain
at high altitude. The pink brick
interior has been sandblasted.
Below the booth’s curtain
I see bare feet and the hems
of long skirts. Some sit scattered
–
among the pews, heads bent
in prayer. The rustle of the page
I write on slices the silence
like a paper cut. Through gashes in the tin roof
afternoon light appears as miraculous
yet terrifying huge stars. I do not know
–
if the holes in the bricks are pockmarks
from grenade fragments, bullets, or the result
of cheap building materials. From the rear pews
the white, crucified Jesus appears
like a far-off ghost, the nails
through his ankles and palms invisible.
The blood has been scrubbed
–
from the floor, or hidden under sand and dirt.
The metal side doors are new
except one with two bullet holes.
The brightly colored painting
behind the alter shows the holy family,
youthful, benevolent father and mother,
heads inclined over the infant Jesus,
His reddish-brown curls falling
to His slender nape.
–
The painting marking the seventh station
shows Him fallen beneath the cross,
a member of His death squad binding Him
with rope, another raising a whip.
Bullet holes pock the doorframe
beside the picture.
–
Joseline, if you are reading this,
tell me if you know, near what station
of the cross, when the genocidaires left,
did you find your mother’s body? Tell me,
–
Father Wenceslas, by which stations
did you traffic with the Interahamwe, pointing out
members of your congregation
on their lists, the flack jacket and pistol
replacing your habit?
–
Music and voices
rise to the vaulted tin roof
and return as if to bathe the congregation
in waves so buoyant it would not be possible
to drown.
–
Through a side window I hear
crows calling to one another,
and cars without mufflers.
–
No one I met, and I asked many
who spoke to me about God,
could say where He was at that time.
That he was somewhere is not question,
that he is God is not in doubt.
–
You, Marie Josée, who also took refuge here,
at age fourteen after they killed your parents,
you whose husband tells me you are still bleeding
from the gang rapes eighteen years ago,
did you pray to be chosen or passed over
the times Father Wenceslas picked out young girls
to save in exchange for sex?
–
Beside me, at the eighth station,
Jesus stops beneath His cross
to console the three weeping women
who love Him. Voices of the scattered
congregants singing their trust in Him,
rise again, like the gentle swells
of the sea.
**
Singing
They sang at dawn, mustering for work,
then, single file, marching to the swamps, with machetes.
They sing on Sundays, now, in Kigali Prison’s church
They worked through daylight, partied after dark.
They sang while searching papyrus reeds.
They sang in the soccer fields, preparing for work.
They sang during gang rapes, and they cursed
those too old, sick or broken to run or plead.
They sing, now, in the evenings at Gitarama Prison’s church.
Some victims begged , Please, Shoot me! Much worse–
The three days it takes to die as macheted limbs bleed
out. They sang at dusk walking home from work.
Marshes turned pink where victims bled, sick with thirst.
Madness turned mud, shit, and sky to winding sheets.
I hear them now, full-throated in Rilima Prison’s church.
Eager children and dogs helped the search–
Ntarama, Gisenyi, Kigali, Murambi …
They sang at dawn mustering for work.
And now at dusk in Rilima Prison’s church.
–
**
–
The Kigali Genocide Memorial
The 260,000 victims buried here
are in four sealed tombs ‑‑
no human bones visible, no stench
of bodies. Thousands of undiscovered mass graves
wait to be found by accident
or exposed by erosion
during the rainy seasons.
The bodies here are all from Kigali.
Each town in Rwanda has its own memorial.
The guides at the memorials are survivors
–
assigned to comfort guests who lose com-
posure.
We hold them in our arms,
Emmanuel, who has become my friend, tells me.
The director wishes there were counseling
for guides, who say every tour
is a re‑living.
–
The memorial is set on a mountain
above three valleys.
From the shanties below come voices,
the killers’ children at play,
which I mistook them for an audio loop
when I came to the room
filled with photos of children
who did not survive.
–
The redbrick patio you cross
to enter the memorial
is built around a fountain.
The beds of ferns and flowers
that surround the fountain are lovely.
A tiny bird hops and chirps
in the ground cover. Areca palms,
spaced across the red brick,
are reflected in the floor‑to‑ceiling tinted glass.
that calls to mind a villa.
–
*
–
Leaders come from countries that could have helped
but chose not to, or which sent help
that arrived too late,
those whose military arrived in time
but saved only their own nationals.
Presidents of countries that aided the genocide,
while pretending to stop it,
and one whose government refused,
until it was over, to call it genocide,
pass the fountain, trailed by reporters,
to make lofty speeches and lay wreaths
as their photos are taken. The outsized wreaths
are carried by guides,
since these are too cumbersome
to manage with grace.
–
*
–
They found many whose bodies were left in
churches.
They found many in latrines.
Many in classrooms.
In swamps.
They found many in makeshift mass graves.
In forests.
They found many at roadblocks.
They found many in wells.
In their homes.
In rivers.
They found many on the beaches of the vast lake
in the next country.
They found many eaten by dogs.
They found many, Emmanuel tells me, Just sleeping,
covered only by sky.
–
When the memorial closes for the day
I sit on the front steps.
I cannot think
where to go from here.
The most frequent comment
in the logbook for visitors
is Never Again. in English, French, and German.
But it is always Never, and Never
Again. I worked around the change of planes
in Burundi
because it is chaotic still.
We switched flights
to avoid Kenya because it is unstable at this time.
Travel to Congo: unadvisable.
On the flight they served dinner over Germany.
We stretched above Bosnia. We slept above Darfur
and woke over Uganda
on the way to Kigali.
–
*
–
One photo in the memorial shows a two year old
whose favorite food, a printed note says,
was rice and chips, her cause of death–
Smashed against a wall.
–
A fifteen‑month‑old boy, whose favorite animal
was a cat, is listed as Killed in Muhavo Church.
–
A two year old in a white dress
and white shoes, whose favorite game
was hide-and-seek:
Bludgeoned to death with a club.
–
A five year old
whose best friend
was his sister:
Killed in Sainte Famille Church.
–
Two sisters, ages six and seven,
whose favorite toy was a doll they shared:
A grenade thrown in their shower.
–
An eight-year-old boy leaning over a plate
with one last piece of birthday cake:
Hacked to death by machete.
–
A two-year-old whose last glimpse
was seeing his mother shot dead,
her favorite toy a car:
Blunt force to the skull.
–
An eighteen-month-old
whose favorite word was ‘auntie’:
Hacked to death by machete.
–
A four-year-old with large curious eyes,
whose favorite food was cake:
Stabbed through her eyeballs and head.
–
A ten-year-old whose last words were, The U.N.
will save us.
–
A nine-year-old whose last word was, Pray.
–
*
–
I wake to the silence
of a well‑appointed house in Ghent, Belgium
on a dank March dawn,
disoriented by leafless trees
and gray steeples
in the Flanders drizzle.
I wake at home in New York City
to questions no one asks,
with details no one cares to hear.
–
I wake as though reciting
in a nightmare, I was born
between the time of an old man,
for whom I was named, running
toward a forest, shot to death by storm troops,
and a young man, Serge’s father, running
from a church, macheted by Interahamwe.
–
I wake as though reciting, I was born in the years
between Holocaust and holocausts,
and the centuries surround me
with fire.
–
I wake at home to a friend’s voice
on the phone, Your email from Rwanda
still traumatizes me. Do not tell me
more about what was done
to women and girls.
–
*
–
If some Interahamwe squads with machetes
had not been singing folk songs
on the way to their neighbors.
–
If the skull of an infant
set on the skull
of an adult in the church at Nyamata
were not smaller than my hand.
–
If the children of the genocidaires
did not skulk after me
in the dirt streets
asking for money.
–
If they hadn’t crushed newborns’ skulls
against the floors
at Sainte Marthe Maternity Hospital.
–
If the stained knives
people use to open fruit
didn’t resemble those preserved
in church memorials for the murdered.
–
If doctors had not been busy
murdering neighbors and patients.
–
If some Interahamwe had not been drunk on banana
beer.
–
If they hadn’t thrown nursing infants
into piles of corpses.
–
If some Interahamwe had not been dead sober.
–
If what I took for rust
on the vaulted
tin roof of Nyamata Church
were rust, not blood, flesh, and brain matter
blown forty feet high
by fragmentation grenades.
–
*
–
To get to the Kigali Memorial from downtown
follow, at first, the tree‑lined boulevard
past white marble and glass embassies
and government buildings along a broad mountain
ridge.
Walk down the steep hill, pass banks, cell phone
stores,
and internet cafes. Descending still, pass Exodus
Pharmacy,
The New Land Salon, God’s Love Pharmacy,
Smart Butchery, and New Hope Auto Parts.
Then pass construction sites
worked by prisoners in pink jump suits
–
who wave and smile if you stop
to take their photos. Descend farther,
past hair salons in lopsided shacks,
sheds containing building supplies
and used car and truck parts.
Then pass a muddy street that slopes
toward an open sewer.
–
Farther below walk past a warren of shacks,
whose tin sides that appear to lean
against tin roofs. The shanties give way
to a swamp that turns to ponds
in the rainy seasons. Those who know French
will greet you, ask if you are lost,
–
if you like the eternal spring
climate of their country,
if you have visited Lake Kivu
and the mountain gorillas,
then offer you their email addresses.
If you stop to buy fruit,
men speaking only Kinyerwanda ‑‑
those for whom school ended
by grade six, or who never went to school —
will cluster around you as you dig out your wallet,
dare one another to ask you for money.
If you ask someone to repeat what he is saying
he will break into laughter, full of mischief,
mirth, and sassy‑sounding questions,
stumbling into you from behind,
with the press of the crowd
that has formed,
and the half playful shoves of friends.
–
If you do not want to be bothered ‑‑
ask: Did you and your family do a good job
with your machete
in the genocide?
and they will halt
in unison and turn silent
like a sea
a god had calmed.
with a word.
*
If the blood staining the church floors
in Nyamata and Ntarama were not so close
to the shade of the red dirt
on my sneakers.
–
If women and girls tied to trees
for hours waiting their turn to be gang-raped
had not been hacked to death
when their rapists were done.
–
If family members,
before being raped and killed,
had not been forced to watch
as their parents and children
were raped and killed.
–
If the skulls in Ntarama Church were not missing
the same front teeth
many of the living are missing.
–
If they had not shoved a pole
into a young woman’s vagina,
clear through to her throat.
–
*
–
It is impossible to say,
Jean Luc replies after thinking a long time,
whether it is worse for us,
who lost our families,
or for the genocidaires
and their children,
who live with the shame
of what they did.
At work you recall
those you murdered
who were your colleagues.
You pass houses every day
and remember the families
you helped kill. You sit in school
and remember
who sat next to you.
At the banana-beer shacks you drink
and the voices of those you drank with
come to you.
*
If the killers had not been dancing
on cars jabbing their machetes
at the sky.
–
If the bones in the underground vault
you enter behind Nyamata Church
were not arranged by size and type
like parts in an overstocked junkyard.
–
If the skulls were not so crowded so closely,
on corroded metal shelves, in rows and files
like children I’ve seen in Rwandan classrooms.
–
If they had not cut off the breasts of women
hiding in the swamps.
and thrown them to dogs.
If they had not forced children
to machete other children to death
before killing them, too.
–
If once they finished
killing Tutsis, they hadn’t started
killing one another.
–
If people hiding in swamps
in the rainy season could have found water
to cup in the palms of their hands
that was not pink with blood.
–
If the row of acacia trees
along a churchyard’s chain-link fence
were not blossoming now.
–
If the distance
between this flower-scented world
and the stench of decay
in the mass burial vault below
Nyamata’s churchyard
were not just eight whitewashed steps
into the ground
from here.
=
If these cadences
were not so like
those that came to me
at Tuol Sleng Prison
in Cambodia.
–
*
–
Evenings in Kigali, young men
start conversations with me,
walk in whatever direction
I walk in, explaining,
I have no family. I have
no money for school.
Please. You can help me?
–
Tall, high‑school‑age girls
sometimes appear out of the night,
gesture toward tin shanties
on a dirt road, and offer
to sleep with me there
for $5.
–
A young man simply points to his calf,
where an infection has eaten its way
to his exposed tibia.
–
A small girl appears out of the night,
saying, Where are you going?
I live right here
in this hotel.
–
*
–
Those who try to explain
how they survived
when everyone they loved
was killed say, God gives me strength.
No one could say
where God was then.
The devil was running Rwanda,
some tell me, but no one questions
that God is God and God
was somewhere.
–
The president says we must forgive,
almost every survivor I speak with repeats.
If they catch the ones
who killed my family,
and they apologize in gacaca court,
I will accept the apology,
and they will go free.
–
Some say, If I see my parents’ killers
on the street in my village,
maybe I smile to them,
but I will be hurting here,
and their hands flutter
to the heart.
–
Some say, if I forgive him,
the killer can leave the prison,
grow food if he is a farmer,
it is better
for our country.
–
Some say, It is better
that I forgive because always to hate
becomes like a poison to me.
–
It is hard to kill a person,
Serge, also my friend, told me.
The day of liberation
a soldier handed me his bayonet.
‘Go ahead, kill this man,’
he told me. I knew the man
had killed many people. I knew my father and
brothers
were dead. I was shaking —
I cried. I thought
and I thought, ‘What do I do?’ I prayed
to God. I told the soldier,‘I cannot.’
And I gave him back his weapon.
–
**
–
From Earth’s Ends
–
Myself
–
“Write about yourself,” the white-haired poet said,
bored with my toddler-beggars and drunk shamans,
with gods of orphans and bargain child brides,
tired of stupas piled with human bones.
–
“The naked girls in your temple vines are stone.
Why should I care about the shyness of whores
in leather skirts who kneel with flowers
for Buddha? Yourself — not children in the foam
–
your wake leaves, greeting and cursing your boat.”
But even in my home I wander half lost,
having outwalked the farthest city light,
to return pre-dawn across soot-flecked frost
–
my lusts bright domes of gold in the sun,
my terrors beggars with stumps for hands.
–
**
Upriver from Hoi An
–
If there’s a river, I thought, there must be villages,
if there are boats, there must be a way
to reach them. If they are not on the map,
not in the guidebook, if the police
and the tourist office insist they know nothing
about villages not on the map,
then I had to see them. So I hired a boat—
with a terrible diesel engine
that belched black clouds all day,
but with beautiful white eyes
on its prow, and, an hour later
on an empty shore I’d pointed to,
children were everywhere, singing
their chorus: How-are-you?
How-are-you? as though it were the start
of a nursery rhyme. Twenty led me
to a shrine where a goddess walked on waves
bearing a lantern
to rescue drowning sailors.
One god can hear a thousand miles,
an older boy labored in English,
One god can see a thousand miles.
Together they guard the temple.
Now there were forty children,
and some adults watching, shyly. Then
Huynh Le Phuong, who was beautiful,
asked me to her home for tea,
and as we walked boys grabbed my arms,
pulled hard as they could, pulled
the hairs and laughed,
and she told me, They like you,
they never before touch American man, and tried
to smile. I walked with my hands above my head
so they could not reach them. At her home
her father placed a thermos of tea
before me and another by the photos
of her mother and brother and grandparents,
so they would not become thirsty or sick
in the next world. You like
Vietnamese girls? she wanted to know.
Do you fall for me? Will you take me
to the Himalayas? The big, big mountains? When you go
back to New York, will you remember me?
Will you write a poem for me, just for me,
and send it?
–
**
–
The Coffin Sellers of Viaja, Bolivia
–
Their moon-white lights stay on past midnight,
doors left wide-open to the altiplano cold,
since store fronts here have no display windows.
The industry of Viaja is cement,
–
a drunk following me repeats. He points
at the looming, prison-solid works
beyond the main square. One store sells silks
pillows, mahoganies, brass handles, and velvet.
–
The other, smaller, piles plywood
children’s coffins, some long as the thigh-high boots
in beer posters here, or tiny as the shoe box
I used, age ten, to bury my parakeet.
–
There is barely room to walk, but credit is easy
and each box comes with a prayer card, which is free.
**
–
The Observatory on the Altiplano, Hours from La Paz
–
Just as it is summer there when winter here,
to study the stars they did not look up, but down,
into a cistern
built to reflect the heavens –
the sky was too vast
in the thin air
–
for those who would study the future
in the permafrost of the Milky Way
to crane upward for hours against the terrible
night winds. The emperor’s statue stands
nearby, head hunched as if he has no neck,
shoulders squared, the posture
of a tyrannical American mayor. Eyes rectangles,
mouth a straight line, nose gone, his hair
–
is bird shit and lichen, his legs covered with wind-
smoothed hieroglyphs, the language
undeciphered. At this altitude a pinprick
of blackness opens inside my head,
threatening to spill, like ink. Across the high plain
scrubgrass flares and glows
–
in the late sun. The driver
who brought me to this wind-
blasted ruin, hours from La Paz,
nothing between but altiplano,
stepped from his taxi again.
He measured what daylight was left
against the dangers of night roads.
Their names lost, I stared for the last time
into the faces of gods
eroding on what palace walls still stood,
their features open to the prophecies of the stars
and the the judgments of the winds.
–
**
From Both Sides of the Niger
–
Both Sides of the Niger
–
Trachoma, typhoid, bilharzia, more Latin names–
until age twelve, usually before three,
both sides of the river, they die just the same.
–
The village chief, hunched on his dirt floor, complained–
You give pencils but give no money.
Schistosomiasis, filariasis– more Latin names.
–
A boy who giggled at his laughter on my tape
and one who tried to drown a wild donkey–
both sides of the Niger the two died just the same.
–
Near a copse of cypress trees the wind changed
the voices in the leaves to those of a sea–
leishmaniasis, TB, cholera, still more Latin names…
–
They die in the pirogue, leave too late
to Mopti, the chief said. No doctor. No money,
Both sides. This river. Sick. Then dead. The same.
–
The bully who smirked, Ka-boom! Bin Laden. Plane!
A scared girl, her “Duck, duck Goosie!” always me.
Dengue fever, river blindness, malaria, non-Latin names–
both sides of the Niger they died just the same.
–
**
–
The French Military Cemetery in Ouidah, Benin
–
Each bronze plaque
is set in a bed
of light–
–
brown gravel.
Each lies in a frame
of white-
–
washed cement.
Two-meter high walls
guard the graves
–
from view.
Their whitewash,
on which I steadied
–
the camera
to take the photo
from which I write,
–
is clean
as the sun.
At the head
–
of each grave
a bronze cross
rises
–
five inches
in stunted
resurrection.
–
On a dais
of gravel
set off by a hedgerow,
–
a frigate captain’s
pyramid-shaped tomb
embossed with an anchor
–
stands over
the meticulously spaced
rows and files.
–
The sand
is swept
from the graves.
–
The leaves
are swept
to a corner.
–
Six dead even
rows of eight
graves each
–
are set in the colonialist’s
symmetry and rage
for order,
–
so different
from the African
graveyards
–
in the forests,
the overgrown
raw cement,
–
some graves
without stones,
some stones
–
without names,
some tombs broken
and vacant–
–
so different
from Ouidah’s largest graveyard,
the sea,
–
on which most slaves
sold here
died in transport,
–
or in the holds
of ships
awaiting transport,
–
the white of the waves,
their markers
and epitaphs,
–
the white of the waves
likewise as fresh
as the sun.
–
**
–
Cafe Baobab
Soldiers come. At night. Kill my family.
I run. They shoot–My mother, my father!
Please. Say your name. Then we go–embassy.
–
Here–no work. They stamp my visa, Refugee.
I run. The forest. They kill my neighbors.
Night. Then–my house. They kill my family.
–
They take from my house. What they can carry.
I try for work. Taxi-man. Bar man. Seller.
Say again your name. We go? U.S. embassy?
–
You tell them–I am your friend. You help me.
You give job. They kill my small sister.
The soldiers. Night. Tell them, They kill my family
-.
Not possible for me in your country?
Europe–we try. You tell them, Congo. War.
We go. You and me. You talk. To French embassy.
–
I ask no cadeau. Not ask money.
You tell my story. You. A writer.
Night. The soldiers kill my family.
You come. We can try. A different embassy.
**
–
Thirst
–
We crossed stretches of river
that a river abandoned.
Bent against the current,
we followed a jagged channel
of wind. Far off was a sea
–
fed by torrents of sun
in which a man could drown.
Where, Ahmed, are the ancient
grave sites you promised?
What I had taken for dwellings
were dwellings of shadows
–
where the sand gives way
to sandy cliffs. Come in under the shadow
of this red rock, taunts a famous poem,
and I will show you something different
from your shadow rising before you…
But you can tell it’s near noon
when there is no shadow.
Ahmed answered only, To kill a gazelle
with no gun–find a tourist
with a four-wheel,
find the gazelle–
floor the gas–one hour,
–
two hours, when the gazelle cannot run
it falls down, then you kill it
with your knife. You get four wheel, my friend,
I show you. What we approached
all morning was not a cluster of huts,
I now saw, as the shadows
that were their sloping roofs
vanished. Where, Ahmed,
are the thousand-year ruins
the guidebooks say nothing about?
–
You say ‘Yes,’ but whatever
you point at turns to sand.
I searched the distance
for where the sea
of desert divides
from the billowing sea of sky.
–
His eyes are brackish swamps.
His three small brothers
pass day after day
memorizing Koran
in Arabic they don’t know–
half humming it in the shade
on the tedious way
to paradise. The road ahead
–
was not a road but a path
of boulders. The path ahead
was not a path but a scar
across slow, sandy breakers
of sun. How long, Ahmed,
how long and far
before the blue of the sea
is the sea?
–
**
–
Arthur Rimbaud’s Bad Leg
It did not come off in Abyssinia–
He made sure of that by paying
a fortune to be carried out–
twelve excruciating, brutal days
to the coast for all involved–
his litter, when necessary, placed on the ground,
so, scrabbling at the sand with both hands,
he could shift onto his side
to defecate.
–
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels.
One day I will tell of your latent births.
–
The now-classic poems from his teens,
like any visionary work,
did not bring such a sum.
Ditto the obscene, adolescent,
homoerotic rhymes that followed:
–
A piece of cheese, a piece of shit…
–
Not one centime came, nor was sought,
from the Paris bohemian literati
he lived off, tormented, and greeted
with such dinner tidings as,
I got fucked all night and can’t
hold my shit–who just then
were publishing Les Illuminations.
The fortune Rimbaud paid
(worth a king’s ransom or lifetimes
of back-breaking labor to most Africans,
though it was pocket change
from his Abyssinian profits)
did not come from the Societe de Geographie,
for whom he mapped and detailed the unknown
regions he journeyed through.
–
I was indifferent to all crews,
–
proclaims his most famous poem, and so he was
to the laborers he supervised
in Cyprus–the malingering or simply slow
worker he killed with a dead-aimed
stone to the temple was his ticket
to Africa. His send-off,
–
years later, from Harar
to terre inconnu was carcasses
of cows, dogs, and goats
that ringed his home–angered by animals
urinating on pelts he left to dry,
he laced his perimeter
with strychnine.
–
Nor did Rimbaud wander through unknown lands
more heedless than the brains of children,
as prophesied in “The Drunken Boat.”
He followed the trail
Menelik II had recently hacked and burned
across the Abyssinian interior–
young men slaughtered,
women and girls raped,
huts and crops torched,
infants, then children and elders
starving to death
as Rimbaud found his way.
–
Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves
that are called “eternal swells of victims.”
–
Rimbaud’s king’s ransom of a fortune
came, in fact, from the king.
Seeing what Menelik achieved
with stone-age weapons, realizing
the steady client he would be
for years to come, calculating
the premium the British and French ban
on musket and bullet exports
to the region would bring him,
–
Rimbaud earned his fortune
by way of the Remingtons,
Mausers, and Martins he sold to the king,
through which Rimbaud became the most prolific
arms dealer in the region,
and the king became Emperor
of Ethiopia, “Elect of God, Lion of Judah,
King of Kings,” with enough firepower
left over to defeat the Italian army
years later.
–
It took forty minutes in Marseilles
to saw through Rimbaud’s cancerous leg.
–
His mother had sent a letter from Roche
urging Patience. And his older sister–
forger of the sensitive,
bogus portrait of Rimbaud in white
robes, playing on an Abyssinian harp
and gazing at the strings in reverie–
she began her lifelong quest to see
into how much more wealth she could turn his legacy.
–
**
–
Against Dying
–
1.
Because of the gods and spirits
that surround Kudadze’s home…
Because his family was curious,
since I am light skinned, and, by local standards, rich.
Or because Kudadze is kindly and patient,
or since I am a stranger, or because
his family expected money…
–
Because it was already noon
and I was leaving the next day,
he and two friends led me to his home
through miles of heat and dust.
When I could no longer ride his rusted bicycle
they walked with me.
When I could no longer walk in the sun
they sat in the shade. Not much more.
they smiled, Not much more.
–
2.
Because the countryside, flat and treeless,
had been surrounded by warlords
and slave-traders
since before they counted years —
the people still build their homes
as fortresses–dried mud walls
too high to be scaled, too thick
for arrows and muskets.
Since dry mud cannot protect
against what is not visible,
to keep out hostile spirits
they etched tightly bunched lines
across the walls.
Taking a double bond against fate,
they scarify the lines
across their foreheads and cheeks.
–
Because the spirits of sickness
seep like water
between etched lines,
A god is needed,
Kudadze labored to explain
in pidgin French.
–
A priest is needed
to know which god.
An augury is needed
to inform the priest
what food and drink
the god must have.
–
3.
Beside the doorway a sheaf of grain
assures the plentitude of rain.
Monkey skulls beside the sheaf
watch the home against the thief.
Crockery crumbling in a tomb
feeds the dead as in the womb.
–
4.
At first featureless and limbless,
the large mud god
they had formed rested
before the house. He sees and hears,
Kudadze tells me, eats and breathes
through the opening
that is his navel.
–
The priest said he demanded cowrie shells–
we set these into the mud
of his body.
–
He demanded wood
to form his legs–
we brought two trunks.
–
He demanded the white feathers
of a baby bird–
we stuck these
to his head.
–
He demanded water–
we set the kettle
before him.
–
He demanded millet–
we poured the porridge
over him.
–
He demanded goat’s blood–
we spilled the blood
upon him.
–
He demanded meat–
the goat’s skull
is beside him.
–
He demanded his children–
the small gods
are around him.
–
5.
Beneath my feet
I noticed the shallow breaths
of a week-old puppy,
rust-brown like the dirt and dust,
struggling to stand
and failing.
–
6.
A boar’s skull beside the door
assures the hunt as before.
–
The gazelle’s tracks in the shaman’s sand
predict the bounty of the land.
–
The shaman reads the face and sum
of what is passing and to come.
–
7.
Children and an old woman
surrounded me from a distance,
too shy to come closer.
–
I became aware of a friend or brother
of Kudadze approaching me,
then a soft, frightened chicken
pressed into my arms, and a voice
in a language I do not know,
repeating what could have been,
You, please, take, and gift.
–
**
From The Cinnamon Bay Sonnets
Prelude
Two Hours After My Brother Called
beaten up and arrested for writing
down the badge number of a sergeant who was beating
up a Black kid who was standing with his hands up,
the sergeant handed me the personal
effects they took from him–a satchel and a shopping bag
full of books, mostly–so “nothing will get lost”
while they held my brother handcuffed to a cell full of other
people,
mostly black and threadbare, handcuffed to the cell.
As he lay curled on his jacket, spread on the filthy
tile like a dog’s mat, a hand cuffed above his head
like that of a person waiting
to say something, I wanted to grab the gun
from this phony polite bastard of a sergeant, I wanted to
start
cursing all of them, their ridiculous
story that he “interfered in an arrest”
–
of a stranger, and “risked a policeman’s life,”
that he “resisted arrest,” that he was “assaulting an officer,”
when they tore his arms back and crunched his wrists;
I wanted to tear up the stickers
on the sergeant’s desk phone with numbers
for Free Phone Sex and help my brother to his feet,
drive him home, take him to a newspaper office, to a bar,
even as I left him there,
bewildered, beaten tired… But this is a lie–I didn’t
have a brother to call that night
though I spent much of it inventing one–
the assured, stubborn rage I couldn’t
feel any longer, the refusal to leave
quietly with my books…
My father did come, and he argued
with me about moving my car,
about the comments I made to the sergeant…
He told me he’d have a lawyer at the arraignment,
though “they don’t come cheap,” and I was broke
then, and still am. But this loneliness…
like the dust I closed my eyes in, the
hopeless, bold chatter that stayed on with the fluorescent
lights
above both sides of the bars–two hours,
four hours, twenty-four, forty-two… the cell more stripped
of familiar presences than anything I know
how to write–this last loneliness,
it just is, and it is, and it is.
–
#3
I am here now and writing–Please listen,”
is how the clear-eyed, peasant-bloused girl I met
above a tarn and failed to talk past kissing
while we way under the stars late that night,
–
began the letter, which out of the blue came–
months afterward from the “spiritual center”
that turned out to be the New Hampshire home
of Reverent Moon’s church. And two years later
–
it was she who startled me out of blankness
on a Manhattan street corner: “No–forget
about the donation, it’s me, Denise,”
–
and it was, until two men in suits led her
away, something unspeakably human that breathed,
startled, standing naked in clear water.
–
**
–
#7
For moments I was still in lockup
each day–and this went on for months
afterward, is how I put it for the cops’
lawyer the ninth day of my plaintiff’s
–
deposition–near the eleven hundred
and fiftieth page of the cross
examination, with the trial still years
off. But you couldn’t really have believed
–
Officer X, he’d started, even if he did
say–these are your words, now– ‘We’re taking
you to the pen where you all get fucked
up the ass...‘ I had nowhere to turn but Block
–
Three–the screams random as wind chimes, the smirking
guards-
silent and septic as troves of rage left buried.
=
**
–
#8
Silent and septic as troves of rage left buried,
despite days to picture a gaff sail’s tall grace,
passing a year that turned on the spit
of a wrecked back; despite months to trace
the tackings of this sun-flecked sequence, then to drift
toward sleep in breezes of morphine;
the storm door slamming in the wind led me to shift
the pillow on my head until I heard thieves
banging to get in, and then the police
who’d beaten me, come back with friends, drunk.
Blue wind. Blue branches. Stay with me,
Lorca, until the guards pass. The ship on the sea.
The horse in the mountain–bear with me till I find
there’s nothing at the door but vision and wind.
* *
#33
How many times have I testified to this?
I’ve already told you I saw nothing;
my eyes were closed; my arms were clutching
my head in a fetal position until the kicks
and punches stopped, and I was lying in a cell,
prone, behind a Black prisoner urinating
into a toilet. I’ve said I couldn’t tell
you the eye color of the officers in question–
as I testified when you asked me their weight,
and again when you asked me their height, and then
when you asked me their hair color, and then when
you asked me their ages–! never saw their faces.
They jumped me from behind in the holding pen.
I stopped screaming because it was useless.
**
#39
Mixing the verses of forgotten children’s rhymes
in the unending fluorescent light and smoke
is how I tried, off and on, to break the neck
of night two, pacing the holding pen,
The lighter-skinned guy, and the guy dressed up,
to the young thug who crept into my path
to ask if I knew how to open handcuffs.
I don’t know I why I picked a frayed match
off the floor–I could hardly see straight enough
to fit it into a keyhole, as if that would do
anything, anyway. I could hardly talk,
and a guy came up to say, We’re all stuck
here and some dudes are looking at heavy time.
Yo! Professor! We’re all sad. Tell us a poem.
**
#40
“Yo! Brother! Can you tell us a poem?”
is what the older, Asian guy asked me,
the second morning at Central Booking–
I do not know the time, as I’ve already
testified. I cannot tell you why he asked
to hear a poem. “They that carried us away
captive required of us a song”
was, in fact, a line I recited in response.
I have already stated, “I did not compose
this for the occasion.” It does come
from one of my poems. “How can you sing
the Lord’s song in a strange land?
was the next line, and, I told you, there was silence,
and I turned away and wept alone.
**
#44
After they tackled me, screaming, You’re shit! You’re trash!
when I next saw daylight I was in chains, herded
to a van. The sky was so softly blue I tried
to tell the mugger cuffed to my right wrist
how beautiful it was, stuttering, Yes,
then Yes, oblivious to his sniggers.
If I just get out, I thought, the next
revelation could come–its shadows first,
tiny as inkberry leaves, which hide
the shadows of the tense bananaquits.
Then the frigate birds rowing five hundred feet
over my eyelids. Then the green that is brightest
at the hearts of the fantail fronds–
however dazed I was, whichever way I ‘d turn
**
From Skidrow Penthouse
Why “Persephone”
Because her wide, furrowed soil-
brown face is like something
once below the earth. Because the goon squad
that had her surrounded
and were hurting her reminded me
(numbers, affect, batons) of the one
that once had done the same
to me. Because, inert as laundry,
she never snarled or struggled. Because…
of the young kid’s sing-song,
She’s go’in to slee’eep, she’s go’in to slee’eep
as they stuffed her, vertically, head down,
into a crate. Because her tongue was straining
to lick my fingers through the bars
the next day. If there’s a canine underworld
it is the pound, this pound,
particularly, whose vet said he provides no treatments,
whose crew–employees
of the Sanitation Department, members
of the Teamsters Union–would not let anyone
adopt her, would not, at first, admit she was there–no stay
of death until it got to the president’s office.
Because she growls like low thunder
when I try to take back my dirty sock,
sleeps like stone, barks at storms,
her head under the bed when it thunders louder.
Because she jumped a guy
about to start a fight with me.
Because, If only I’d had her in 4th grade,
5th, 6th, 8th, 9th…She was so dazed
when let out of the cage
she barely, at first, would move.
Yet she can pull with the suddenness
of game fish. Because it was late February and soon enough
the branches scraping the wind
would bud, the only home I could find her,
of course, my own—because, because, because…
and so she became Persephone.
* * *
Haiku
Drifting to sleep
counting syllables–small pears
in mother’s old tree
——————————–
Yet one more
haiku stolen
from spring rain
—————————————
Below the hem
of a spring cloud–Venus
and two stars
—————————————-
In the emptiness
of a blank Sunday in May–
some sparrows singing
—————————————–
Mother’s gone.
Sun-lit orange leaves
don’t matter.
—————————————–
POETRY, Books, Selected Poems, Reviews, Essays, Photos 