Good Bread
for Abebe i.m.
Still warm and spongy almost wet
a circle of injera on the mesob
sits in my mind’s eye and goes with me
reaching its gentle hand into my head
it makes me think about the day
your father took us to a market
in the hills that red-eyed roadside boy
furiously begging to be fed…
do any of us really understand, Abebe
how finger close a boy can be
and still have nothing nothing
of the world’s good bread?
Inglizawi Negn!
Sometimes he stands on the balcony in his blue pyjamas
and sees it through the eucalyptus trees
slips out when day is lapping at the dark
and stands there looking over garden gates and walls
over tin roofs clicking in their shadows
down a track that wanders into the evening
out towards the faintly green distance of hills
already stirring with bats and the idea of pumas
he can hear bells and bits of conversation someone far away
banging a nail knows himself to be small and foreign
standing on the balcony of a big quiet house
that holds him up holding him like a hand under his feet
but never feels unwelcome in the semi-dark
if someone hails him from the track he will call back Selam!
if someone asks where are you from, little boy?
he will answer proudly Inglizawi negn!
he doesn’t really know right now where English is or what
but is not troubled by the things he does not understand
while his eyes follow silhouettes of long-tailed birds
and he feels this moment stretch almost forever
When I Was Ten, I Started Watching Men
Some walk into a sunbeam
and their heads catch fire
some smoke an arm around their friend
or saunter hand in hand with him
others keep their shyness like a torch
inside the pocket of their trousers
unzip themselves against a wall
and whistle as their boiling water flows
many have the necks of swans
that suddenly swing round to look at you
hundreds every day are causing bushfires
to break out boys’ tongues to parch
be my boy wife!
one calls but hotly not in words
from the beautiful jet coals of his eyes
In the Lion Gardens
Old men sitting by the apple trees
can you hear me?
I am an old man too we’ve shrunk inside our shirts
our coffees are so strong they may outlive us
I look for Tagesse who’s he? a boy
who I imagined in the famine
when we both were boys Tagesse shouting at it scraping by
in it grieving and enduring like the meaning of his name
he must be getting on an old imagined man
no, I did not send him
to another famine or the Eritrean war I did not forcibly
resettle him in Illubabor I could not write more suffering
wendimé!
says Tagesse and rises from a bench of smiles
because he made it through
his being here is blessed! he comes towards me autumn eyes
and winter hair a courteous old man of Ethiopia
but do I clap him on the back when I had food
and he did not? his life and mine
his acre of the mountains worlds apart Tagesse, sit with me
beside the cages old lions have such splendid manes!
tell me your story from the start
not its surrendered facts
but every feeling just as you remember it
we’ll sit here for a month, a year the apple trees won’t mind
until my ears are bleeding and my heart has stopped…
my joy in boyhood filled
a thousand fizzy bottles kicked at sadness like a mule
but now I’m liverish, light-headed old stomach trying to digest
the plate of misery it missed just as your happiness
will always be half-starved
by wants and horrors which I heaped upon you years ago
open your eyes!
you shout at me, but not unkind so I stand up
and look at you, at me and feel that I am falling
by Chris Beckett