Uprooted and in a strange land.
His dark face, a replica of darkened
alleys at home where tongues are dried
of hope, kitchen hearth of embers,
crops stunted, springs of life dead.
"It was dead for years" he said.
Seasons pass under baked skies,
Hunt for water ends in obsequies,
tankers make a pile out of the deprived,
brackish waves leave the shore caked"
His smoke rings mock at his pain,
a salve to the wounds festering again.
"With kin surviving on toenail,
I am now torn away... in this hotel,
anchoring the building blocks of life:
I care not for the faces I serve,
abuse or the brimming oven of strife;
What I earn sustains the kin's nerve,
keeps hearth burning, bellies half-empty"
A distant glow on his inscrutable visage,
like a weary orphan stumbling for footage.
"My mother sees in me a veil of halo,
though my land remains fallow"
As his words emptied into the falling dusk,
Aswathama's voice sifted it of the husk.
My tramp put it well; "friend!there it goes,
Him learning to walk in the land of ghosts"
( A conversation with a bell boy who was 72 in Microtel Inn & Suites Gulf Shores , Alabama... A black man trying to earn at that age... Lived his grit,)
His dark face, a replica of darkened
alleys at home where tongues are dried
of hope, kitchen hearth of embers,
crops stunted, springs of life dead.
"It was dead for years" he said.
Seasons pass under baked skies,
Hunt for water ends in obsequies,
tankers make a pile out of the deprived,
brackish waves leave the shore caked"
His smoke rings mock at his pain,
a salve to the wounds festering again.
"With kin surviving on toenail,
I am now torn away... in this hotel,
anchoring the building blocks of life:
I care not for the faces I serve,
abuse or the brimming oven of strife;
What I earn sustains the kin's nerve,
keeps hearth burning, bellies half-empty"
A distant glow on his inscrutable visage,
like a weary orphan stumbling for footage.
"My mother sees in me a veil of halo,
though my land remains fallow"
As his words emptied into the falling dusk,
Aswathama's voice sifted it of the husk.
My tramp put it well; "friend!there it goes,
Him learning to walk in the land of ghosts"
( A conversation with a bell boy who was 72 in Microtel Inn & Suites Gulf Shores , Alabama... A black man trying to earn at that age... Lived his grit,)
