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
