Norman Loftis: Two poems

Dakar

The young sewing machine mouths

stitching and unstitching a sententious seam across Dakar

peddling to tourists

all aflutter with bubbles

the goddes of the ocean.

I diocese her rising at dawn

out of the ocean seaspray

feeding the cranes

circling upon extended wings

skipping through the tropical rain forest

running naked across the mountains

with the stride of an antelope.

All the talking tympanums joined in

announcing the coming of a brother from another planet

an ex African snatched howling

out of the swirling vortex

and carried across the sea

to be seasoned

to of recent origin infamy

added to the infamy of the sea itself

with its precious cargo of living flesh

strewn across the sweetly undulating waves

food for sharks that attack each other.

You penetrate the city awed by its squalor

the squint of lepers

sunning themselves against rocks

women set up as plane trees

bearing their weights on their heads

beyond them the sea

alive with fishing boats

and a celestial expanse the blue of paradise

artisans hawking their wares

mask and jewelry worked by the hand of god

It is the organ of visions of those black boys

wordless and far off as Mars

extending a grimy hand towards you

slithering end carefully composed defenses

to haunt you in those nooked reservoirs of feelings

you not ever knew existed.

Turning from you without contents and dazed

they move on

washed in the delicious stream of things

always on the go

trying to elude

the embalmer's knock upon their door

the fossilized rest of centuries

that has made its grave imprint upon Dakar.

I return to the mark where the exile began

walking cooly above the island of Goree

watching with rapt attention

the African women wash clothes in a courtyard

heads wrapped in calico

babies packed upon their backs

the wind fiery off the sea.

This is where the catastrophe began.

This was the last stop

the extreme point of the line before the extreme point of the line

where black gold was torn on the outside of Africa

stowed spoon fashion in the galleys' hold

cramped as ore lining a mine shaft

chartered for America

the flowers of Africa

yanked from their roots

See: this is where the slaves were weighed

said the guide

as he pinwheeled away

shielded from me

from the judgement of history

by curious gawkers

who claim no blame for these events

sixty kilos sixty

or be marooned in these rooms

and fattened for the slaughter.

We have seen the flowers of Africa

yanked up by the agency of their roots

like screaming mandrakes

to place sail on the Marmaduke.

We walk from single wretched room to another

still ruminating with cries that will not die

hearing our guide recite a catalogue of cruelty

how fifty men were stowed in a space

that spanned thirty feet

how the officers cavorted with the comeliest women

how toilet privileges were one time a day.

Even at this distance

separated by means of time and the sea

a deadly rage rises to my teeth

And at the same time when you consider it

who's to blame

the slavers that bought men

or the Africans that sold them

for a not many trinkets?

Follow them as they raid neighboring villages

already ripe with rumor and with fear

sweep like a sandstorm

hacking fleeing warriors

having their way with women

the survivors carried not on wriggling and screaming

in sackcloth or in chains.

It is high noon.

We examine the fortress

have a light lunch

overlooking the ocean

board the ferry

bound back to Dakar

back to motor jawss incessant chatter

back to the fruit vender on the street

with sum of two units teeth in her head

but with a smile wide as the sea

to blind men l through their little girl children

to a teaming, ceaseless humanity

trying to escape leprosy

trying to put a propel on poverty

leaving this desperate life in its tracks.

At the Village of artisans

you sit quiet as a cat

watching these master craftsmen

carve the graceful face of god

from scabrous hewed tree stumps

thinking of Michelangelo and Leonardo

the artist guilds that knew no guile

nothing on the contrary the sweat of the brow

to form the artifact

the master hand that can do

and did repeatedly amazing you

free from the conceit of conceptual art

framed by means of its diarrhea of ambition

its constipation of imagination.

The ocean is cerulean as flaming oxygen in a jar

merging almost imperceptibly

with the line of the sky

To be here one time was to die

to say profitable bye to all earth had meant

to be provisions for fishes

fodder for shrunken egos

of convicts abruptly free

dumped on the of recent origin World like atomic debris

prisoners who took no prisons

neither r man nor black man nor Englishman

southern heartland of vanished glory

in the mind only

Now they watch you with a certain envy

brother from across the way.

The water's not reaching far down enough to measure that divide.

No, you're not the conquering hero,

far from it. Neither are you the "little man"

living in shanty villages

where goats and naked babies race freely

a people on whom the orb of day has set

and risen again

only they don't know that yet

as they race towards you

bringing emaciated bulls

as you walk among the cattle.

Not a favor, no, to have been sold into slavery

but to be from The City among this squalor

to have struggl state side

among the towering steel

and the winters that won't pass away

with their intolerable snow abstractions

the inverse of these screaming suns

that drenches everything in its smiling fulvous yule log

is, let's face it, rather a privilege.