Next poem is from my book "Mere Mortals."
It's called "Obscenity."
The anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard
founded the discipline of social anthropology
on a study of the Nuer.
They were the people that I lived with.
And he wrote a lot about many other people in the Sudan.
And this one seemed very timely in the '90s.
I mean, my poem seemed timely.
He was timely for a long time.
The quote is, "Obscenity is not often
an expression uttered by an individual under great stress
and condemned as bad taste, but one permitted and even
prescribed by society."
"Among the Ba-Ila, among--
as if swarming the Petri dish of the British imperialist,
there exist expressions used collectively,
that is, in the presence of women and children,
in fact, in chorus, since these obscenities are sung,
not scrawled across a riverbank where
innocent boaters of Victorian persuasion
might encounter them.
His great penis is a size, a thing without end.
It must have a long unwinding.
That, the female mourner's song.
The translation arch, as if the words
themselves might make the gourd warrior rise in tumescence.
Sometimes it's just what they do with their hands, singing,
writes the patrician scientist, who considered obscenity
a privilege, a way to spur routine labor with ardor,
or to invoke life at the moment of death.
I drag in the anthropological, so one can reject
the paradigm of the primitive.
We, who have no physical labor which requires our neighbor,
nor sustained interest in creation, except in art,
that work to ward off death.
There will always be those in the boat who slow down,
who listen and transcribe in their tiny script."