I stretch and yawn, Chest swells, Tongue tests the biting edge. My belly growls. Skin ripples and flows over curves like water that wears the rock to egg-smoothness. I am continuous. Light bounds off my eyes as off polished green apples. I am fit and sound. My mind is a muscle, limber, Having the strength of flexibility. It dictates stealth or brawn, Deception or force, The quick, dynamic blow, or The deprivation of the beast left in the abandoned trap. My Gods are voracious. Your doe-brown eye overwhelm your face, Absorbing light, Attempting photosynthesis. Head teeters like a lollipop on a half-chewed stick. You are lines and angles, A heap of broken peppermint sticks, or A pile of dried twigs covering a tiger trap. You are parts -- a puppet -- Stick legs jointed with tendon strings and hair, Limbs jerking in the dry breeze. Your tongue worries bloody gums, Searching for a chip of grain seed, a sliver of grass, lodged between remaining teeth. Your mind has shrunken -- Musculoparalysis. It is thoughtless, irreligious, Fixed on instinct. You have no Gods.
Published in the Soundings East literary magazine, 1984, Fall/Winter edition.
In the early 1980s, I was following the news of the famine ravaging Ethiopia. My memory of the specific story that inspired this poem is now vague, but it related to the theft of some of the food intended for starving people in the most drought-stricken provinces. I wrote the poem from the perspective of a well-fed person looking, with no empathy, on the starving person beside them.