Everything
The bowed-out scrape and dust bowl of the country,
the rural formulae, the forgotten over-the-hill land, the farmland,
the romantic landscape of dream, everything isn't.
Hope is dying there in a bucket of slime. A child in rags drags something.
Mothers burning the home fires and weak men tippling toppling
felled trees climbing up hillsides in the shape of pine. I no longer
know when I last saw a native tree. Tried to say, what tree's that.
The hillsides grow into mountains at the fringes of the imagination
in every direction I look. Everything: pine and bluegum, pine and
bluegum. Pull me out of here. What do I feel? Nothing. Landscape.
Fear. Terrorism. Blind. Hope, despair. Word games. Scrabble.
Mindgames.
Bechuanaland.
Botswana.
Basotholand.
Lesotho.
Nyasaland.
Malawi.
Mozambique.
Victoria.
Larry sending himself to school, like a letter, at the age of twelve,
interviewing principals.
Zambesi.
Zimbabwe.
Ruins of nations.
Somewhere beauty roams
unswerved by justice.
The unreal blue street at night might as well be cake, glazed in
the night. Odd lights and silence, void. If people are living there
they are ants. What they believe is terrible though they don't tell.
And life's still waiting out there, everything.
Miscellaneous