The Thin Line

Every morning opening the newspaper, I am faced

with the thin line that divides disaster and deprivation

from a world of luminous wealth. Tuesday, January 29th,

for instance, bodies, many of them children, lie on the ground

They drowned in the canal trying to escape a weapons depot fire

and explosion in Lagos. Their heads are twisted in straw and dust

near the feet of on-lookers whose cries we cannot hear

And across two thin-as-breath lines: a cocktail shaker

about the same size as a body in the foreground

gleams quietly for $950 in stenciled silver

reflecting nothing in its lucent surface

I have learned to compartmentalize, to mentalize

I can tell the silver shaker is beautiful, in its way, but to see

it glisten there separately, something strange has to happen to my sight

There are bodies on the ground, there is a pristine cocktail shaker

and two infinitely thin, poignant lines. The cocktail shaker

levitates to the foreground. It is untouched by the chaos, the loss

the weeping, the wet bodies, the smoldering munitions

Heaven would restore our sight. Earthly paradise

would dissolve the lines

Heaven is not a gated community. Silver is covered

with mud. Mud is covered with silver. The wounded

are cared for and made whole. The dead are washed

and mourned. We would leave nothing out

Not one atom of existence outcast

This is no dream

“Parts of the canal were blanketed with hyacinths.

A woman’s pink shoe, a baby’s slipper and a bright orange

and red skirt floated among the plants.”

This is earth. This is paradise—how one grain of paradise

looks on a day in January. We are its eyes

Source: Rewild (Tupelo Press, 2022)