I.
BAY DOCK’S PRESENT SILHOUETTE
She and I used to sit out here,
on this skeletal dock
above these polluted, grey-black water,
and smoke weed mouthing off theoretical theories –
as to why
balancing our economy meant pairing off whatever cover bones
without anesthesia –
crazed economics biting through the soft belly
of our gross domestic product,
stripping this pier of its reasons – its rituals
its sailors,
back then, she wore cornrows
I had stopped combing my hair –
free reign for it to be matted locks
Feet dangling above the tremor of tides,
we waited for ships that had long dissolved
into grainy photographs – contradicting anecdotes,
through rising curtains of smoke
we spoke in the impatient grammar of young revolutionaries –
big fish devouring small fish,
the island’s history folded inside a textbook’s annotated paragraph.
And sometimes, remembering her laughter –
how it lifted from her throat
like a bright flare fired into evening –
I feel it again:
the dock wasn’t the only thing
that went under.
+++
II.
COUNTRY-LIGHT, COUNTRY-DARK
now, from this bespectacled distance,
memory arrives like the tide –
slow – uninvited.
the island leans still,
under the weight of currencies that do not belong to it.
exchange rates lap the pilings, as if testing the patience
of what remains.
she drives a Benz now,
windows tinted, making forgetting easy,
a bypass road takes her away from this shore;
where she rides as the wife of a nouveau-riche investor,
whose wealth rises even as the stock market crashes,
does she remember how our country unstitched itself
before our eyes –
how the dock buckled sideways – if everything
we believed could be held steady?
Whether she recalls it or not,
I stand here knowing:
the dock wasn’t the only thing
that went under.
+++
III.
LESSONS IN TIDE & COST
I teach now.
kids whose eyes mirror nothing –
but the reflection of a future that refuses old narrative,
of underdeveloped versus developed,
colonizer versus colonized
dog eat dog,
they care little about theories
that once made us furious with hope,
looking out there now on the wide expanse of memory,
the sea moves with a certainty the country no longer has.
and as waves tap the rotted boards –
as if insisting quietly on their verdict.
I finally hear it for what it is:
the dock wasn’t the only thing
that went under.
===
BEFORE TALKS BROKE DOWN
war was a probability
an eventual fatality of soldiers.
kids were still playing in the streets.
the radio carried songs
about lovers falling in love in normal tomorrows.
before the war our world was quiet – ordinary.
you flipped a switch and lights came on.
after the first missiles:
buildings – what was left of them
stood trembling,
afraid of being the last column upright.
on bruised, dark oozing streets:
people ran from their homes,
bits of their meal in their mouths, some
in their cloth bundles, slung over their backs, in their pockets
some falling from their gripping fingers,
as mathematical formulae broke through the bracket,
parts of a broken buildings even fell onto a little girl’s words:
her split lips drained into meandering blood:
‘I didn’t choose this place,
this broken roof caught in my hair and ribbons.
how much deeper, how much faster
could my bleeding fingers have dug,
to clear the rubble, to find the boy I was playing with
before the ground collapsed into this cave.
I want to stop crying but I can’t.
we were running from the falling apartments, from dead mothers
dead fathers – jumping across busted sewage mains.
slipping where the ground
hadn’t sufficiently hardened.
we ran even from televisions sets falling out of the inferno –
their screens still lit
faces still talking – maybe of trying to stop this,
and this soot-covered day that keeps chasing after us.
we ran towards the white canvas roofs –
where a red cross camp might be – we were too small for this hell…’
===
DIAMONDS WERE DUG
They came for what was buried
beneath our skin –
muddy rivers where my grandfather
once washed his aching feet,
before harvesting ground was split open,
and its value must be gouged out.
drills continuous humming their way
through village bones,
veins long busted
collateral bleeding out.
now the river churns with
silt and ghosts,
a slurry of what we used to be.
we being mud –
each of us sifted,
each of us searching the bottom
for what was taken.
we didn’t march at first.
and the murmurs grew louder – much more sharper
in the stitched brows
of mothers at the water pump,
in the quiet scratching
of chalk on blackboard walls.
no precursor shout,
breaking of glass, nothing –
then came the fireball –
like thunder.
smoke so thick it swallowed
everything
our very sense of existence.
===
BREAD
Fell from small-looking planes,
with well-fed country markings
under their bellies.
Through the hazy, unconscionable sky,
above lands of sand,
above oceans futile with
in-rushing empty waves.
Out there, in this barren grey sea,
swimmers weak from standing,
waiting with empty bellies,
tried to swim toward flotsam.
People with beggar’s cans
collapse from the twisted queue;
the melee twists, turns—
jagged again toward the bread drop.
And finally, when a broken bit
of sodden, salted dough
drops into soot-stained hands,
hunger swallows itself whole.
Manna once fell from the sky—
legends say
it tasted
good.
===
EMPTY PLATES
Empty plates are outstretched,
reaching for the other side
of the chasm,
where surplus food is incinerated.
Across bombed-out craters,
jutting sharpened rebar,
across distances of fencing,
political philosophies.
Across thousands of other empty plates,
the rattle of trembling spoons,
across hunger and the well-fed,
across the words like enough – satisfaction.
across tables of cereal and pancakes,
maple syrup,
across and back to the same sound of slop
dump in chipped, dented plates.
because across is a plentiful land –
across is a truck besieged by
empty plates, empty stomachs,
empty hearts.
across the same bullet-dug ravines
in emaciated skin,
across is seething munitions hidden beneath the dust.
===
Poetry: Eaton Jackson
Image: Mahdi Bafande Unsplash cropped