OF A THING
OF A THING WHICH COULD NOT BE PUT BACK
She approaches the door in leathers cottons+denim Brittle
rain slanting down on bone-chilling March day Does not
head out into fray Closes the door sits on chair upholstered
with grapes on vines Foot beats time to American Roots music
Fiddle sorrowful banjo plucky She does NOT move
Early spring inertia brought on by news: 500 women+children
kidnapped yet again Boko Haram taking over the world one
village at a time Souleymane Ali local trader quoted B.H. :
They are slaves so we’re taking them because they belong to us
His wife & daughter not excluded
There is no protection by the army of Goodluck Jonathan On the
road to Damask 100 bodies lay many with throats slit by retreating
madmen And from their desert prisons Ceres is a beacon 46,000 k. away
Ancient asteroid shines a light on plight of 500 newest slaves
Obama said he’d find the girls but can we blame him for all our ills?
While big dim +obscure Ceres (a.k.a.: apt description of G.L. Jonathan)
is about to be explored by NASA’s Dawn Mission Would it require
rocket-science to locate 500 people? Infrared cameras operate in the
dark at wavelengths as long as 14,000 nanometers!
Yet we are driven to explore rocky+primitive way stations to God? Planets
that have not changed much over the past 4 billion years Ceres is 2.8
times farther from the sun than earth & is likely stone cold Of course you
know warm hearts beat all over the Nigerian hinterland
What more is there? The last traces of dinner gone glasses washed &
gleaming on this soon barely remembered day When hundreds of small
feet marched on their way to guerrilla camps +new husbands
__
Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the
deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they
hummed of mystery. Cormac McCarthy The Road
Spring 2015
songanddancegirl 