Poetry
Mama always sat us down before her
when she opened the India chest,
showed us embroidered bagh,
phulkari cloths, chadars, saris,
family letters and masala spices,
talked a bit about everything.
We sat in awe of what she said,
of what she showed us:
the beauty of jali embroidery
colours she dyed, indigo, amber, gulabi,
and the alchemy
of hundreds of bits of mirrors covering cloth,
reflecting us.
She told us about our waddi-bebbe
our bhua and taia in our lineage,
of how we carried out our sekeria,
our relationships, arranged marriages
(there are four sets of kinsmen you can't marry)
and how we lease our lands. We can go anywhere
in this world, our roots are always with us.
She put them back into her peti,
taking care we learned to fold
letters, tapestries and cloths along
old lines, pressed,
locked in.
Unemployment
The chrome lid of the coffee pot
twists off, and the glass knob rinsed.
Lift out the assembly, dump
the grounds out. Wash the pot and
fill with water, put everything back with
fresh grounds and snap the top down.
Plug in again and wait.
Unemployment is also
a great snow deep around the house
choking the street, and the City.
Nothing moves. Newspaper photographs
show the traffic backed up for miles.
Going out to shovel the walk
I think how in a few days the sun will clear this.
No one will know I worked here.
This is like whatever I do.
How strange that so magnificent a thing as a body
with its twinges, its aches
should have all that chemistry, that bulk
the intricate electrical brain
subjected to something as tiny
as buying a postage stamp.
Or selling it.
Or waiting.
Wayman Ascending into the Middle Class
In the middle of a trans-Canada excursion
while he visits for a week with the parents of a friend
Wayman lies in a hammock through the hot August days.
Far behind him now are the horrible winter mornings
he got up in the dark and dragged his lunchbox off to work.
Here, as he sips a drink in the gently rocking couch
scarcely a thought crosses his mind about his old companions
still probably stumbling about complaining as they
hammer nails, steer tugboats
or chase logs through the bush a thousand miles away.
A light breeze springs up. Through half-closed eyes
Wayman contemplates flowers, and a leafy screen.
He begins to sway into sleep. The beer bottle
slips out of his languid grasp
and falls almost silently onto
the thick green lawn. Wayman sighs.
He feels himself float
in his hammock, and begin to drift upwards:
ascending, as he snores
into the middle class.
AIR SUPPORT
A dropped school falls through air,
turning slowly as debris
pours from windows: a contrail of papers and books
streams upwards thousands of metres
alongside computers, chairs, desks that tumble amid
woodworking equipment, lockers, maps,
basketballs, stage curtains
all aimed
toward tiny huts far below--a brushy hillside's
cluster of subsistence farms
reportedly harboring armed men: fenced yards
with a few chickens, one cow, an ancient horse eyeing
six rows of parched vegetables.
Above the school
while it descends,
another follows, and beyond that, nearly invisible,
a third floats as the fighter-bomber arcs
away, and a second jet drones into position.
The pilot of the first, now on the mission's homeward leg,
reaches down in his cockpit
toward a thermos of hot coffee.
On the ground, hospitals released
in the initial attack wave
erupt sequentially into plumes of fire and dust
as the buildings land: operating tables,
obstetric wards, wheelchairs shatter into shrapnel,
the jagged particles racing outward amid the roiling smoke
to slice through mud walls, animal flesh, stone fences,
human lives that cling to the shaking
shuddering earth
while they clutch forty-year-old rifles
or axes, or the hand of a two-year-old
below the flash of wing
very distant
in the blue-and-white sky.
