A plane touches down
At Sana airport
Taxis past broken lives,
Dead dreams,
Opens its bay and accepts
A stream of humanity
And departs
It’s an old river
Its drainage is ambition,
Pride, retribution.
It has flowed in torrents
Since all of time
See, here, on this map
The deep gorge it cuts
Through history
Its course so familiar
It is forgotten
By every new generation
Some seek power, wealth
Others, only refuge.
Through the train window
Flashing eternity
Rolling, rolling, rolling
The hillsides by.
Later, I’ll say
I’ve been there,
Traveled through that place
Convinced and mystified.
Later still, I’ll return
And say
That’s not how it was
All skewed and modified
By isolation from memory
Disappointed
By lack of congruity
Deflated
By the irrefutable
I
You are meaningless, it is said,
without those who went before
in whose long shadows you strive,
in whose helix you twine
inextricably.
Ghosts, you call them,
wraiths with no claim to substance,
until, in a mirror,
you see them bounding through
your fate,
great feet tramping up the path
you thought was yours alone.
How can you be so like them?
How can it have gone unnoticed
so long?
Is nothing left to separate you?
II
Fine, let’s have it, then.
I’ll be the last witness
to poll the seasons.
But you’ve lost your will
to power, haven’t you?
Would you think your
reflection grotesque, off-putting,
if you saw me now?
Would you see an empty mask,
devoid of all you held dear?
As you wish.
We are both powerless
to divine our true meaning.
The unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Socrates
So, I’m waiting for this horseman,
Windows barred, doors flung shut
In a vast pretense
Of indifference.
Only, I see roaches,
Resigned, driven by doom
Under cracks, seared by dim
Flashes of light, some blue,
Some red, not just unaware,
But irrelevant
Like distant quaking nuclei
Star struck long, long ago.
This means little,
For now not only exists,
But does not exist.
A parable
A man, blind from birth,
Is given the gift of sight.
The bandages come off.
He hears the voice of his beloved wife,
And sees…
An incomprehensible blather of light,
A tide of something he has never experienced,
Like water poured on the back
Of a desert beetle,
Or love in the heart
Of a man who has known only
Survival.
A week later,
He is blind again,
Rejecting the meaningless confusion
He has lived without his whole life.
His wife, devastated,
Leaves him,
Thinking she has seen him as he really is,
Ungrateful, mean.
He thinks he knows her at last
For the first time,
A creature wholly devoid of empathy.
Meanwhile, the sun rises over the desert,
And light falls on a beetle,
Scuttling under gathering clouds.
exiles child 