the elephant weeps

no one speaks of the elephant in the living room,
weeping and weeping and weeping...

Africa is a vulture waiting for a dying child,
we cast downward eyes, lest our gaze give
us away and we like a seed open inside
the constant drumbeat of the
one who walks about,
India is a salt doll, dissolving all blue skies
with the platitudes of rebirth into higher being
as if the chaste and the caste were inexorably linked
between economic status and health,
Palestine is a blanched driftwood upon the
seas of recognition, making way for the recovery
of the human soul amoung the firebombs that melt
the skin of being inside the crucible of hearts that
bear witness,
while China sews the shroud of American capitalism;
our nascent emptiness is a match that is waiting
to be struck
and the tinderbox is the gasoline we pour into the
fire of awareness.


~A