THE SIEGE OF FREETOWN
For two years I lived and worked in Freetown, Sierra Leone, using all the resources at my disposal (mostly a very busy xerox machine and an always available meeting room on U.S. Information Service premises) to help a group of brave, determined women dislodge a vicious military junta and start a beleaguered country on its voyage to democracy. Meanwhile, a shockingly brutal civil war was being financed by “blood diamonds.”
Sierra Leone is a small country, but child exploitation and human mutilation on any scale are soul-searing. Here are the opening lines from my tribute to a beautiful land and to the good people who suffered so much for so long:
| I hit them hard in my hurry. The steps creaked and bent and threatened to snap, but missing a word of the news, our lifeblood news, on BBC FM was not to be thought of. I didn’t knock, never knocked. Friends don’t. Just slipped in and sat, facing the Mayor, my host, ears cocked for every syllable from a crisp British voice unfolding the latest vileness in a war begun next door but ours now: a testament to lust for ugly little stones muscled up from mud pits and smuggled out, to be cut and polished and sold as ageless emblems of elegance, affluence, love.High above the city and the college and a flat indigo sea, eyes closed, listening hard, I tried, as did my village headman friend, to feel remote and safe in that paradise of tiny Krio settlements and garden plots ravaged, for now, only by chimpanzees still hunted in the bush, but here mostly chased by little boys with pebbles and shouting. |
Updating done, for now, the Mayor clicked off the precious little Sony he’d set between us on a table draped for tea with a pretty scarf cross-stitched in girlhood by a genteel aunt. Tearing open a pack of Britannia biscuits just fetched from the village boutique by one of many grandchildren (all of whom preferred a fistful of the M&Ms I always brought), he arranged the cookies on a plate. Snatching some candy, the boy climbed up on Grandpa’s lap.“When I was this lad’s age,” the Mayor recalled, “we had a piano. My Mother’s pride.” His voice held more than a trace of rue over worlds lost…. |
END NOTES
Recovering from the shock (but not the anger) induced by the unnecessary and painful death (due to post-operative medical negligence) of someone who’d once been close to me, I wrote this set of 17 poems which seem to demand their own space. Here are three from the sequence I call End Notes:
The lease on my house approaches expiration. Renewal was never an option Can hermit crabs survive without a shell? * Give me the touch of life, your fine firm body matched to mine, your heat to mask my numbness. *
A kind god would gentle us out, knowing we’d done as well as we could with the luck we had. This god would open windows to fix our eyes on Cassiopia, the Milky Way, the ascendent moon, the Pole Star. Snuffing the light, as in theaters, so slowly it’s hard to be sure when dimming’s begun, or dark’s arrived, this god would tenderly let us go.