Thank you.
I was going to one up Maria and dance one of my poems,
but I'm not sure what's going to happen today, eh?
OK.
All right.
I wrote a poem a while back called
"In the Village of Missing Fathers."
And somebody-- one of these inspirational moments--
somebody challenged me to write a companion piece
called "What About the Missing Children?"
And I thought, well, I don't like
taking prescriptions or taking suggestions for poetry.
I'm very independent and very territorial about that.
But this one stayed with me.
"In the Village of Missing Children."
"The old do not call themselves old.
They call themselves dead.
They call themselves forgotten and silent--
the footprints made by water that
evaporate and erase leaving the ground thirsty for contact
all over again.
They call themselves banished, abandoned, invisible, asleep,
the winter that welcomes no guests though it pleads
for them clearing wide paths on streets that grow white as bone
and grieving its decomposed flesh.
A wooden bench rots in the park without a story to tell.
A lake bends at the knee without a church.
And off in the distance, a body melts
into the light like the final whisper from the dying man's
mouth.
O, sheets, give me more glorious butter cups that bleed.
O, crow, morning's ubiquitous beggar,
ask me for a piece of bread, please, please, please.
O, wall with a clock for a mole, I'll
never again turn away from the sight
of your three bristly hairs.
But no one hears such supplications or notices
the weakest of the weak wearing moths instead of buttons,
knots of yarn instead of throats,
and screwing bottle caps into their sockets
to keep the milky eyes from leaking out.
There's already a woman haunting the streets with white feathers
on her head.
And when she cries, the tears harden on her cheeks
like chicken shit.
She gave birth to a son who broke like an egg
beneath a military heel.
And what a surprise to find out after all these years
she was a hen.
She perches on a shoe at night and pretends
it's an umbilical cord and not a lace.
What a disgrace to flaunt her childlessness that way--
complain the mothers who must scratch around
the pictures of their decorated dead--
O, rosary of baby teeth, O, belly button crucifix--
in private.
The fathers cluster at the bar to coat their battle
scars with gin.
One cradles a bottle of wine and tickles its label
with his finger while another tries
to coax a cork into its neck.
In the corner, three shadows rock side to side
murmuring a lullaby.
And the bartender nods off into a dream
because, at 55, he's the youngest in the village
and sits closer to the memory of infancy than anyone.
He'll climb atop your lap if it will make you chuckle.
He'll let you share your kisses with a slice of pie.
He'll even, but only for the price of a potato,
let you watch them suck his thumb.
No one judges him when he slips into his truck
pajamas and begins to nest.
In the village of missing children,
there are sadder scenes than that--
a mayor scolding the mice for eating sugar
and refusing to brush their teeth,
a schoolteacher reading a fable to a row of coffee cups
to usher them to sleep, a doctor's wife
pinching her nipple numb over the orchids
when it's time to feed.
And every yard, tricycles rise like gravestones.
And in the fall, the festival of raking leaves,
an annual archeological dig for a marble, a miniature wheel,
or the plastic head of a doll--
any toy at all that will prove that children
once inhabited the land.
One day, a couple found a slingshot.
And, for a week, they were crowned with the most coveted
of artifacts, birthday party hats,
sun-bleached and slightly bent on top.
Still celebrated symbols of the times of laughter.
But before the couple gave them back,
he shot her from behind then shot himself--
their blood sprinkled on the frosting of uneaten cake.
No one wore the party hats again,
and the people curse the suicides for taking that away,
and cursed the war with its appetite for adolescent hearts,
they still contract at the sight of partial nudity.
And curse the men who wrap their flags around their eyes
to bind themselves to loyalty.
Curse the women who allow their sons to murder other women's
sons and call it victory.
And on this village of the stupid and the blind,
this curse.
May you never know the magic of a child who
can point and pierce a cloud, who can squint and cage
the parakeet before it flees the house, who
can bite into a cherry and rule the world inside her mouth, who
can color in the autumn's brown, who can pinch
the sun between two fingers, and then, with childish mercy,
let it out.
May the miniatures inside your memories--
little socks and little shoes and little braids and little
dresses--
pop like seeds and disperse into the wind.
May the shrills of giggling, the shrieks of tantrums,
sink into the smiles of hoof prints filling up with mud.
May the bite marks on your arms around the edges
of the pastries lose their baby teeth and rot
as you yourselves decay each child this day
in the village of missing children.
May you call yourselves extinct and collapse among the cribs
turned rib cages among the sticky tar pits that
used to be the swimming pools.
May your shadows vanish from the center outward
and then roam their final hours as the outlines of neglect
in the village without a playground or a school
in the village where you drape your sagging
skins across the windows for a last encounter
with the fading light, in the village where
bodies and buildings marry into rubble
and can't even birth the dust, in the village
without headstones, without history, without names,
and without ghosts."