Tenth Anniversary

Was I sleeping while the others suffered?

Am I sleeping now?- - Samuel Beckett

Spinning an aimless globe in the geography

section at The Tattered Cover, sipping chai in

an overstuffed chair, I am hoping for Happy Days

and Godot to dull the orphan’s voice buzzing

a litany from last night’s screen: they passed by,

they thought I was dead under all that blood.

After the machetes, the birds that wouldn’t stop

screeching, the road games of pick-up-bones

and ring-around-the-ribbons-of-flesh

the Red Cross lost count after a half-million,

after not enough body bags after the child

flew out of thetreethatwassproutingwetrubies,

one, it seems, the colonel forgot to wash off

his finger in the hotel before negotiations with

the Canadian who recorded those utterly empty eyes.

Estragon: Do you think/God sees me?

Vladmir: You must close your eyes

Somewhere a woman is shouting: do it,do

as they say but her husband’s slack arm,

collapsed under the machete’s weight, refuses

to bargain her for the children ’til his Tutsi wife

pleads you must, not knowing the little ones will

watch mama fall under daddy’s blow then numb

more each time they visit him nine years in

the Hutu prison. But blood has its own memory.

Vladmir: Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake

     or think I do, what shall I say of today?

 

April 2004