Diamond Back Estates duplexes gave a shudder
Claire thought it was the folks living next door
She walked outside a few minutes later
And the earth seemed to tremble
Her imagination was working hard today!
At church someone asked her about the earthquake.
Where was it? She asked.
Twenty-three people were incredulous she did not know.
They had all felt it that morning.
Didn’t you feel it?
That’s what it was! I thought the couple next door was being frisky!
Being from the Midwest, she never thought of an earthquake.
Yesterday
Somewhere in Monrovia
Shining stars dropped off the skies
They wore a beaming smile
Brandishing their pockets and lifestyles
Somewhere in Monrovia
A container was sexually abused
Darkness crawled through her eyes
And her legs were thrown apart by
government officials
Bought duplexes with stolen funds
Drove the latest cars
Ate from best-known restaurants
Left the masses to struggle against crumbling walls
Somewhere in Monrovia
Yana boys and girls screamed
Crying, chanting and grieving
While they held pieces of our country's future
Modern and ancient thieves
Bootlickers and ill-fated beings
Mental retarded first-class animals
Embraced corruption as a way of life
Somewhere in Monrovia
We walked through the principal streets
Raised battle-cries and war songs
But they served us with torments and abject poverty
Bring back our money
Yet, with the high pitch of our voices
It seemed so low to their outer, middle
and inner ears
We now live with faded hopes and broken dreams
They intrude even into his kitchen,
hunting.
Now they loot fruits, nuts, spices, herbs, honey-combs…
Yet he tells them about a *Black Vasa’s medicinal miracle.
They come again,
strip the forest of the flora and fauna
and construct resorts and duplexes.
He’s driven away like a mongoose.
On the top of a bare hill,
he hunches with an empty stomach-pot.
As he takes some rice from their sack,
they collar him
and beat him brutally,
calling THIEF!
Media cook his corpse.
Remember
he was an Adivasi,
the original inhabitant,
yet he’d to live muted in a desert
within the forest.
*Black Vasa – a medicinal plant used in the treatment of arthritis, asthma etc.
First printed in The Literary Hatchet
I walked for a while on the other side of the road
The whiteness of the late morning clouds
The moving rounded shapes of familiarity
Walking in the same uphill direction
With eyes in the sky
I do not remember the gutter on that side of the road
The pavement was narrower
Allowing front gardens for two storied duplexes
It was somehow more rustic and countrified
Looking over the hedged in tram tracks
The storefronts separated by flat doors were smaller
Blended together as one building
Which they actually were
I had not noticed this
Though I'd spent most of my life in it
Crossing the street had not been easy
Getting back would be
For soon I'd be where I'd always crossed
To walk down Thomas Lane to school
I stood in front of the blacksmith's
Smelling the burnt hoof horse sweat
Realizing the comfort of familiarity
The clouds sailed by as unconcerned as ever