They grunt and drag their shoes
And don't know how to order food
Or know too well how to order you around
You send the younger boys who speak their tongue
Who didn't know them then when they were around,
About and bearing down
You stay behind the wooden slats of your office
They will sit on stools to order you
But as is your wont you will not bow
Leave that to them.
They use unintelligible syllables to bark their desires, their orders, their room changes, their discussions, their phone calls.
Or they ask for this or that, a soap or toilet paper or batteries for the remote or where to park their cars meekly apologetically delicately probingly in preliminary fashion trying not to be peremptory
They run the AC all day, never mind that they're away.
They order and they eat, their eating is like pigs as they go to their troughs of rice. Through their troughs of rice.
Shameful. In some ways they are so much like your people guzzling snorting the eating dead serious out of bucket-like feeders
Their hands like paddles
The drink they drink the spring water they gulp and rummage through their mouths gargling the juices endless they desire
Fruits of the East, you must admire.
They bring in packets from outside,
Stuff them in waste baskets but don't close the pails
Crows fly and congregate around the spilled rice and parched diced vegetable bits burning in the morning sun, harsh and ugly beneath the mango tree you planted here those twenty, thirty years ago an inheritance for some future children or grandchildren you hoped to nurture in a world free of barbaric violence and endless hate and barbaric hatred and endless violence because
You held the hope
They complain your prices are too high for their SUV gas guzzling families so food from outside is a must
Some of them,
They dress so nicely and children speak English and shower before they jump in the pool, so civilized, better than the sunswoped Europeans with their grease and perfumed poofy thighs
Maybe they stopped in the ponsala before in the center of town next to the police station "Law and Order: the Breath of our Nation," spoken tongue in cheek, with impunity as they say, this police station that sent charred or burning body parts across the fence not so long ago. Yes. Law and order we drink it like the clearest dearest liquid.
You can tell who they are by the incipient developing bellies, or not so incipient, well developed, very well developed, not through the knot of an enormous sarong inflated bulging busting brutal like in the village but through a tshirt and a pair of vacation shorts, suburban, suave, sleek, yes yes well fed, as well fed and as well developed as any SUV driving American cozying up to their drive-thru Starbucks or McDonald's as they lift their voices to the microphone and slip slap their plastic through the window
Bulletproof and only slightly screened with ketchup and with grease
the smooth caramel skin, their smooth caramel skin the way they use their cell phones to do business while they're on holiday, or the way a Big Man sits at table with his malli or assistant smaller, delicate-er, quieter until enwrapped in his own hierarchical journey of ayya and malli and makes his orders heard, the way their wives dress, the delicateness of their tread here as they open their car doors with the Western Province license and step across vanquished land
This is your property but it is theirs
No comments:
Post a Comment