Village

by Wanda Waterman

May 29, 2023

Hello, there. You don’t know me,

But I’ve struggled to extend to you

Regard you have not thought to grant to me

And I have failed.

I’ve tried to think of all of you as real

To imagine that like me you love the soil,

Would die for your children,

That at night with your love your heart lifts up

Great wings and soars o’er

Worlds that welcome it

But I have failed.

And you have heard the funeral march,

The portly tuba’s oom-pah-pah,

The trumpet’s dirge, the flute’s alarm,

You too have heard him cry, Allah!

Allah! Allah! Allah! Allah!

The Afghan boy with the severed arm.

You’ve heard and gone on harming.

I’ve tried to understand

But I have failed.

I’ve tried to contact you,

To meet with you, to get a chance to

Share my fears with you,

To hear your fears,

To work together for good,

To give you one more chance to put things right,

To not shore up your crimes with my resistance hey

I failed.

So why do I still believe that somewhere deep inside you, you are righteous

That stubborn in your hearts lives on

A longing for a village

On a hillside, near a valley, by an ocean,

A village in the raw salt wind,

Beside a forest,

Flanked with streams and trees,

A place of mud and meadows,

A place that smells of leather, hay, green wood,

Fresh bread, strong beasts, and soup,

A place where one must work at times

(And too, at times, must not),

A village full of friends and only good ones,

Where no one knows a blow,

Or slights the blessed air wherein she lives.

The sweetness of your yearning

Is your curse.

You blast it with coins and shells.

See both now lying spent and sinking fast

Into your largest captive’s wounded flesh.

Your fathers dreamed this village before you

While living at the feet of manic giants

(Giants who burned villages).

In new lands you found villages of friends

And with infected breath

Destroyed them all.

And later on, in Cameroon, Chiapas, East Timor such villages,

Those ancient royal sites that you unselved!

There will be many villages again,

In crook of bended knee and folded arm

Of the bones of that behemoth once hailed great.

Be silent now, be derring-do.

Be fearless, b'ys,

And dream your village true.

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