quarta-feira, 29 de novembro de 2017

pieces ( after Human Flow) working on this!.


i.  

they arrived in the village on foot, by the hundreds.
they arrived unwanted, dragging a child or an elder,
a sack of belongings.  it was in fact a lovely place:  green
mountains, little black goats on the hillside, onions, potatoes
ready to harvest, and a river too wild to cross, almost
dragging them under,  against the chain of hands and
arms.  it must have been autumn by then, padded
jackets squirting clear water, weight for the crossing.
that was after the bombings, but before the camps,
and  before they saw the fire-colored horse, its slow
circular gallop, its  sweaty flanks, its eye toward
freedom


ii.

escape by water must be the hardest.
we take our walk along the coast, doing a shoot of
abandoned boats.  that one belonged to a fisherman. can't  you
see the pieces of net, the scales, the skeletal fish, dried
under tongues of sun?  this is almost the tropics.  wooden
boards losing their red, their green, but we find a ski
 boat in white and acqua, in fading plastic drifting from
 some other port, some high rise shoreline .  no one would
come here by high sea,  skimming the waves in absolute darkness,
fearing a storm or a mother birthing in a cabin with nothing
 but elbow room, and one last gulp of fresh water.
and that makes part of the story:  pirates centuries gone,
a coastguard expecting no surprises, a sleeping village
that could be awoken to plunge into the  low tide, pull out

the feverish, offer  the hands of a midwife


iii

to return to an abandoned city:
the women scavenge the ruins,
then shoulder the desperate tasks
of washing  the fluid-stained walls,
covering what is left of windows,
sweeping, stacking, or mending
the anything that  can be put back
together. a lone cow walks
 the streets, her bell ringing,
 her udder full.  war has been
 the business of men,  the work
 of memory for somebody's
children.

iv.

three Palestinian girls have gone to the beach.
there is in each, some deep harbor of hope: to where
can the boats carry them, each night  on the edge
of desire, where checkpoints and gruff soldiers  blur
into waves and sunsets,  or a midnight café where
music churns out onto the drizzle of streets and
dancing?  a tiger has gained his temporary
 freedom,  his non native savannah.  today all rests
in the hands of the men,  yet they are bound to
to the borders, the barring and the burning.  to
imagine is to excavate in depleted fields,  to unearth
all we have done to destroy
ourselves.