Balloons In Malawi


I heard of your hunger, how you cried with flies
sponging sweat on your distended wineskins.

Scores of children suppressed in a corner

of the world with open sores, wrinkles

 

fill shadows over dearth faces.

Your dejected firmament is my same blissful sky-

the sun that burns you drought is the same

pinwheel that brings me growth.

 

On my wide screen one evening, blown on PBS

air-timed about the time I sat at the dinner table-

staring at the camera lens as a classical symphony

shared the precious moment.

 

Landscapes of cactus and yellow-bark thorn trees

scattered across flatlands. With hair in a tress

a woman etches stone with charcoal along the road

to Gonaives, street beggars pull wooden handcarts

 

filled with bones of relatives- perhaps to suck the marrow

or offer up to half-eaten gods. Pregnant woman succumb

to barren mountains, with pails pitched of murky water.

All painted in gray dust.

 

I decided to sponsor a child named Anaya

eighteen dollars a month could pouch nsima.

Two letters and an updated photo each year,

she was the seed that burgeoned my life.

 

I remember as a child in school, the school

sending up notes in helium filled balloons,

hundreds arose for the famine of the world

we prayed as they vanished in the clouds.

 

You grew like a broomstick,

thinly capable to be swept away.

 

I received your letter, translated-

Thank-you for help, I am in school.

My family needs to move closer to clinic

so my brother may medical.

 

Those balloons the sky swallowed,

I’m sure, have expanded buoyancy

and fell belly-swelled of anemia,

where Christ ascended as a balloon

 

bursting a thousand seeds of maize.

He commanded: feed my children.