November 16, 1993

 

 

The tarmac is barely discernible

From the baked, hard dirt

That lazily swallows its edges,

As we stall to a landing

Trailing dust storms from our wings.

The air is dry in the sun’s bright rays and
Jam carrying a multi-hued palette of fears;
For the first year in twenty

I am home again,

But I do not know this place.

The city seems diseased,
Bombed, what buildings are left,
Scarred with bullet pocks.
Fighting broke the food chain,
Now there is man-made famine.
Too, soon will come rain

And with it - cholera.

With this crew I have returned to record
The nature of this tragedy.

But I am beset by the things the camera
Cannot capture.

At the Red Cross camp

We are given our ‘technical team’ -

Guns for hire; security for the tour.

There are armed teenagers everywhere

As we make our first visit, to prove our neutrality
To the warlords; the stinking scavengers

Who control this city, and who my guts threaten to
Revolt at, by the though of

Boot-licking to.

From the camera truck, a woman
Lying at roadside,

A stone clutched, pressed hard against
Her head. Her desperate grip fading,
As children, near catatonic,

March naked to the feeding centers
And lie lifeless in the teasing shade.
Of perversely swaying palms.

At the center for the severely malnourished
I curse my own health.

Intravenous needles pour liquid food

Into breathing skeletons

Lying on coarse mats

In a darkened room.

Stiff with the horror, flies on my skin,

The stench traces miseries through my nose
And I resent my own body

For noticing this discomfort.

The Other Press

“SSOMALIA DIARY.

With now, a mother;

Whose last remaining child sits with us,
But in unnatural stillness;

I speak in Somali.

I quiver, her words like splinters,

Her agony a rough bark

Against my nerves, newly exposed.

My tears before her dry eyes

Shame me bitterly

By my body’s ability to spare them.

Still later, we caught in crossfire

As gunmen in doorways shoot shadows
In the bloody twilight.

Macho youth, too numbed by death

To value life, or see their crime,

The smell of powder strokes their rage.

On the morning I ride

With the collectors of

Overnight dead.

Lifting corpses, by hundreds

From hospitals and feeding centers.
After the first stop

I do not continue,

The bodies are so tiny.

JADE

Credit for this piece is deserving td: IMAN,
for having made the trip, and having written
about it in ‘Vogue, Dec./92. * From her
experiences I have shamelessly intuited and
extracted these images and feelings, both with
and without evidence. Both the ideas and the
title have been lifted, respectfully, from her
article.

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