Musings a Few Years Post India

Came back and got caught right back in the trap

All those juicy things are on the board, but I can't get to any of them

Squeezing out of a corner of the cardboard house

To run along the sidewalk in the dusk dark

While the rising moon watches with ghostly eyes 

The cicadas just about to burst into song

Dogs barking in the distance

You can tell it's a conversation

How we love summer

That free touch of evening air on your skin

Before the crisp white edges of the moon

Even knowing it's not flat

It lays against the blue-black sky

And now what's on the board

Doesn't seem so far away at all.

It's All Karma

Do you feel like an endangered species –

Or like a predator?

When the inevitable happens

Will you go under water

Or wait in your bunker

To make an art form of denial?

 

Each day we see the fruits of karma

 

The smiling faces gratefully aware

 

The shoulders pressed by heavy burdens

 

Some are graceful

 

Some are awkward with pain

 

But we're all in this together

 

Like the penguins and the crocodiles

 

The jellyfish and the swans

 

The honeybees and cockroaches

 

Noah is an embryo

 

In a young mother's womb

 

And we are not ready

 

For the Somali Warrior

A woman rises from her pallet

Sky still charcoal, the air chill

In her cloth too thin for warmth

She takes a calabash

And straps it to her forehead

Makes her way in the gray morning

To the high hill and beyond

To the waterhole where lions come

At dusk, now quiet

She fills the vessel

And strides carefully

Back to her house made of twigs

The house she made herself

Next she starts the fire

Rolls the meal into a flat round

And adds it to the pan

Never taking off the ropes of beads

Around her neck and wrists

Never growing out her black curls

More than an inch



Her man gets up now

Enticed by the smell of food

Lifts his head from the wooden pillow

Pats his elaborate headdress

Wraps his cloth around him

Stands and reaches behind her

Kisses her neck where no bead impedes him

Slaps her bottom where she has not been cut

And where she still feels something

And the woman grabs the hot bread

By the edges with her fingers

Tossing it into the center of a plate

She hands it to her husband

And looks out the door

At the rays of new morning

Dancing on the dusty earth.


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This poem will appear in Veils, Halos and Shackles:  International Poetry on the Abuse and Oppression of Women.