Small World
by John deSouza
Just neighborhood stuff around my in-laws’ house that has changed over the many years.
An afternoon with my wife, her old Tato, and her sister, who disarms everyone with passion
and kindness, with an endless sort of generous, contagious, merriment. We are adaptable
and try to find the best in people, learn something, or find something to connect us in the
neighborhood, which is gritty but colorful like the strings of bright yellow, green, pink, orange,
black, red of the woven reed baskets in the Ethiopian store’s window.
The tree is fenced around,
the little metal plaque says Linda’s Shoes, 1974
on the tree’s enclosure.
But more recently Linda’s
has been replaced by Yohana Convenience Store.
(ዮሐና (yoḥānisi) is my prenom in Amharic.)
The world gets smaller to us
in some ways, in others grows in all the new detail.
There are 109 languages spoken
in Ethiopia. Some spill over,
cross into Somalia, are from before borders.
Tigrinya is a little different,
a Semitic language
that dates back 4,000 plus years. Tigray spills
its blood into Eritrea to the North.
The people on Bloor St., here, are tired
of differences and wars, of violence. They miss home,
gather to joke and roast coffee,
attract others from elsewhere
with the rush of caffeine and untraceable sacredness
of Frankincense and popcorn.
The owner tells me of a 6th century church,
high on a northern mountain that Orthodox Christians
climb as needed to pray.
The rock-hewn space is beyond our yearnings
for reward and recognition. The ascent is treacherous,
from which no one has ever fallen.
In the Woods
These Connecticut streams
resist arrangement. Doubt
splits attention. Will grapples
rocks. A forced overlay
of wakefulness. No lull.
Here is the stream. In
time’s measure softened.
Blur of capture. Softest
as the light dims. Alone
again, practicing intention.
You and this other,
uncompromised. Flirt
that twists through rustled
leaves. This voice also,
torn sky in treetops.
Thought, a violet clarity,
settles throughout, absorbs
retreat. No path follows.
Moon-time and no-time,
darkness, another return.
Dream here at home,
a living expanse stretched,
the unmeasurable years
alternate, emptied, filled again,
lead back, trickle inward.
Altar/Vivtar/Вівтар
But what do I know of famine and war?
Only the pain or thrill of listening to the reports,
images and videos of other people’s suffering.
Unless kitchen talk, around a Ukrainian table,
like a boisterous altar to a benevolent god,
clever people who were there, who survived.
My wife’s family, five generations
of stories that go back centuries—
What to do, listening to Twitter Spaces,
while I fight slow domestic battles over
what’s for dinner, and my politicians
can’t decide how much not to help.
Letterpress Landscape
Something unspeakable.
Say it. Scraggy trees, a stream, snow.
The way the water
flows across the white card
conveys everything.
The experience of black
streams under white snow,
alive but remembered.
Am I the way there?
While the politicians dither,
good and bad people die.
The reporters putting out bait
for the hate-hunters.
Like those hungry ghosts I animate,
thin necks and bloated bellies.
So many questions, and I,
no longer young.
In the Winter scene there is
less suffering. Describe
what isn’t there is another way.
An invisible stream flowing
between me and you reading this,
a printed landscape.
And in the snow, blood, dead
soldiers strewn like straw.
BIO
John A. deSouza’s poetry has been published by WayWords, Apricity Press, The Orchards, All Existing Literary Review, Half Eaten Mouth, David Cope’s Big Scream Magazine, and has been translated in China in New World Poetry. The poems ‘Altar’ and ‘Letterpress Landscape’ are from his recent collection concerning the war in Ukraine, titled Unimaginable Hardship/Zero Line. The first part of this collection, Unimaginable Hardship was recently short-listed for the Letter Review Prize. John’s wife’s family is Ukrainian.
