DARFURA WANTS

 

In the last moment before sleep, when Darfura

closes her  weary eyes and sees her grandchildren

through compound lenses, she thinks of herself

as a dog with row upon row of wrinkled teats.

 

Not so long ago, a bitch from a nearby village

brought a baby home from the bush where her 

dying mother had left her. Lucky baby; the recently

bereaved animal nursed her. Darfura’s own family

watched, their eyes large, their tongues swollen

with thirst. Long ago, in the mission school, she

had written the word Dog on her chalkboard

when the nun asked for God. If God were visible,

a dog perhaps with access to the deeper well,

then how many nipples would  She have?

 

Darfura sees God as a fountain spraying milk in

the mouths of  babies, spraying water on her dry

rows of corn, spraying the elixir of love on child

soldiers. In this season of flood and drought, she

is an old woman, almost forty. Her teeth are gone,

her empty breasts swing when she walks with her

empty gourd on her head. She thinks they almost

touch the ground. That’s where she’s headed now.

That’s where her children sleep alone, no longer

afraid of the darkness that brings children with

guns, no longer afraid of  the love that kills.

 

In the last moment before sleep, Darfura wants

to weep for Africa, wants to flood her garden

with grief  then greet the new morning with hope,

but there is no water left for the luxury of tears.

 

                                               ----------Linda Rogers

 

 

Past President of the League of Canadian Poets and Poets for Peace activist
and Canadian People's Poet for the year 2000, Linda Rogers is a poet,
journalist and novelist whose believes that the written word can make a
difference in a troubled world.

 

 

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content © - Linda Rogers
Music: H P Chourasia © - All India Radio
image source - New York Times