Invisibility

Brown is invisible.

Neither to see nor be seen-

minarets like shadow

monsters on the walls,

the sun cruel for burning

a hole in the middle of the day,

a black hole

of doubt and darkness,

the camels lost,

the soldiers run away.

The sun sinks at the end of each day,

then like a great fish rises

out of the desert in the red morning.

"Welcome, Sun!" a man shouts to the noise

though to him it's no more than a warning

of darker darkness to come.

(In physics it's true that what can't be seen must exist,

but who has worked out the equations for history?)

In his mind he still hears Umm Kulthum chanting the Qur'an;

in the oil fields, the children are deaf and dumb.

Do you know what it's like to cut out an eye with a bomb?

Can he feel what it's like to gouge out an eye with a thumb?

Ignorance and violence strut together,

cakewalk partners from classical drama

and other horror shows in which the blood

of actors substitutes for martyrs

and the good die young.

This is his first death.

Surely the others will be like it,

but how can he know whose report to believe,

how many there'll be, for how long?

He hears smells, tastes words, touches sounds.

He feels the air change color.

Some say they'll yet save his sight;

some, they can't.

If tomorrow in righteous anger

he rips the world apart like paper,

there's small surprise,

but for the time being he has few regrets,

no sense of having lost

(though losing what is death to hide),

only a longing to do such good

that no one can forget.

Hear what the Lord said:

Revenge is up to me; I'll pay back well.

Fair enough: no man

can decide how much is due.

The worst isn't what has been done

but what others don't yet know they'll do.

He wonders what he looks like:

Am I also the blind boy in al-Ayyam

in tattered shirt coming down the street?

Will I dictate to the world the contents of my mind?

On this street there's no looking glass-

I can't see out, you can't see in-

there's no one stepping through.

Indeed, because I'm brown you don't see me,

and because I'm going blind I can't see you.

F. D. REEVE'S The Return of the Blue Cat, with a CD of jazz and poems, will come out in 2005 from Other Press.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated May/Jun 2004
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