Genocide, Again, and: Gone Fishing

231 Two poems by kwame dawes If a man were to wake in Sun City, he would smell the truth of prophecy. Those close by will die by machete blow, those far away will die of the plague, and those who are spared will know the famine of orphaned days, the youth wandering motherless through the hollow houses tucked into the overgrown valleys and hills, the yam vines choked by the verdant bush, and the way the earth swallows the wet stain of a dead body. The famine will soon destroy the remnant, leaving an impossible cavity in the nation. A man wakes to the truth that sometimes God’s word smells like the rotting flesh of murdered bodies scattered among broken incense bowls, cold wet fireplaces, strewn clothes, splatters of blood on the floor, an overturned pot, rice grains hardening in the stale air, and an empty leather sandal. GENOCIDE, AGAIN 232 Catfish, bream, and redeye bass, River of Muscadines, of hardwood bluffs, and mossy grottoes, here in the soft piedmont earth, it is here that I come to rest, where the shelter of green crowds away the memory of wide open spaces, deserts, blood in sand, the dry stench of rotting bodies, the voice of the leader edged with jest and the boast of a barroom brawler, brittle bramble on waterless plains, the ache in me for my dead brother, for the shattered limbs, for the ordinary order of the suburbs where the world is oblivious to the sound that prophets make when they wail across a city trembling with the falling of bombs. I toss an arc of black net so it falls tenderly GONE FISHING There's your hoe out in the sun Where you left a row half done —Louis Armstrong and Bing Cosby 233 on the olive yellow surface of the whispering river; then I wait in the ticking heat for the weight of the catch, and I pull with the slow grunting of a laborer consumed by his labor, knowing only that the hum of trees will not be startled by sudden explosions, but will fall asleep at thickening dusk. ...