Worth Repeating

“At the beginning of the Revolution all of us had utterly rejected anything to do with the past. We would no longer drive cars, or wear suits; neckties were considered criminal. Anything that made you look well-off or bourgeois, anything that smacked of affluence or sophistication, was scorned as a part of the old order. They, around 1978, all that began to change. Gradually materialism became accepted, then required. Designer clothes from the best European tailors were the uniforms of all senior government officials and members of the Military Council. We had the best of everything: the best homes, the best cars, the best whiskey, champagne, food. It was a complete reversal of the ideals of the Revolution.”

From the Memoir of Dawit Wolde Giorgis.

January’s Poetry Installment

 
FLOW

As your pink toes touch
the scalding water
you discover that your voice
is a veneer cast on stone;
your sight, a dilation of age
upon age; unhurried – sinking
in the languid furnace to your knees,
your chest – the roots and vines
have crept only to the dead banks,
as if what escapes from the deep
livid pocket (neck and jugular)
is untranslatable: the wooden pillars
of the summer dock grow scales,
a corrupted reptilian green; you are
immovably articulate by now,
your skin, loosened and wrinkled,
as the forgotten ichor in your blood
uncoils; your capillaries widen
to a sleepy gaze inwards and

sky, blood-warm and buried
under so many years of cold.

 
 
 

(c)2006 Rocco de Giacomo