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Notes Taken Flying Low and Slow on a Red Cross Plane
First the earthquake
and the women trying to save their kitchen glass.
The men regretted their broken aquariums
tenderly they lifted the fish into bowls for safety.
There were some minutes of peace.
The mothers serving morning rice.
Sunday market bustling.
The sea receded and the prices dropped
as old men walked out, to pick fish
like fallen fruit around the feet of trees in season.
While chewing and haggling the people heard the ocean explode.
Explode like a bomb.
Then he, Neptune, or some bastard adolescent son of the sea god
began to roar
He came as a hot black wall
with stinking breath
and white cobra teeth.
Tsunami, we later called him,
came from many directions,
pushing trees, buildings, cars, mothers, cousins,
babies, wooden cabinets full of everything we had,
five kilometers inland.
The scrap metal that cut
Rizkyıs cheek
Decapitated his father.
Rizky, eight orbits old,
let go of his father and found a wooden plank
which carried him upcountry in the flood.
His cousin floated on an upholstered couch in comfort
But it was sucked back out to sea. Gone.
Sarjaniıs six year old daughter was torn
from her arms.
All the mothers repeat and repeat the story,
of not holding onto the baby.
A caribou offered her horn
and swam to the surface. An old cow
dragging a pregnant woman skyward,
to leave her by the roof of the Masjid.
She gave birth that evening, right on the roof of that Mosque.
Seventy people found refuge there,
imagine that one would be a birthing woman,
another a midwife.
When the water receded, they lowered the baby down
in a black plastic bag.
In the rubber forest you will find "Search and Rescue"
workers, and survivors. Everyday they look for people,
after two months they still find fifteen bodies, twenty bodies.
They donıt worry about where to dig, wherever they dig,
bones and a little flesh, torn garments to be recognized,
wait to be found. Why do people wait for prayers?
The animals, those not in cages,
quietly walked upcountry, when the earthquake began.
Somehow they expected the sea to be drunk with anger,
and so they left.
To Love a Wife
Bang Hanafi had a wife. She visited his leaf-enhanced dreams
to tell him, where to find their baby daughter. She told him, to dig under
a tree, by a shaft of sunlight, where she and the baby were waiting.
He led his few friends with picks, an old shovel, to the deep mud.
When she was uncovered, he said she was beautiful.
"In her life she was black and thin. She had wished to be
plump, and white, and now she has grown big, pale. I only wish I had some
fragrant oil, to help her smell a little better."
Roti Aceh
They call this bread... roti
spun from precious sugar,
boiled in coconut milk,
pounded from rice,
woven with hands which swam the tsunami waters,
and somehow lived.
And somehow, painted red with henna, remembered how to cook.
The veiled women send this bread of Acehı
like skeins of golden cord, tightening
around my life.
It pulls me back to the clinic,
to unhealed wounds,
unattended sorrows,
merciless dreams of remembering baby daughters.
This sweetened thread loaf
ties me to sleep, on hard packed Sumatran sand
where 500,000 recently dead souls
are also trying to sleep.
The women, picking sea weed from their black hair,
packed this witch-bread in a box of prayers,
heavenıs banquet labeled, "operation blessing"
Losing Trust in the Rainbow
He is not my most beautiful child,
This, last one from my body -
copper, copper, red, pink, rusty penny boy.
He is the child of the truest and unexpected
love of my life.
The love that rings in the bells of my body
and wakes me like an earthquake.
Spills like water
from one flooded rice field to all the fields
freshly planted below.
A spreading deep green glass floor
reflecting storms
In Aceh I saw the end of the world
The rainbow promise of a senile God, broken.
We can never fix it, or mend even one sorrow
by sharing grief or forgiving ourselves for still living.
Enough,
the bird still sings and I pray for my own children.
What Will Never Dry
On the beach at Meulabouh
54 days after the tsunami
I found a seamanıs hat
just coming ashore, home without the sailor.
Two twisted tricycles,
plastic torn from soup packages,
a little bit of hand crocheted shawl,
A boyıs shoe, size seven, with no sole.
A hermit crab living in a perfect shell,
A rusty broken military tower, looking West.
The sun is setting upon a peaceful glass table top green and silver sea.
Behind me is a mass grave and a Mosque still standing.
God, what does that mean? In nearly every village,
and broken seaside city, the arched Mosques
with onion shaped copper crowns, still gleam in the day,
stand proud and mostly white.
The Indian Ocean tenderly sprays my face with his salty spit.
I am aroused by his breath in my ears, and so I walk forward a step
until I am wet.
He is warm, the temperature of tears.
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