1. Wartime
but no sweat, my mother had
tapioca on her shelf. A yellow
cardboard box, browning at the bottom.
Its contents labelled with a blackish
pen and ink on off-white paper.
No sweat, though people seemed
at work: women half turned, baskets awry,
black and lush leaves marching. Tapioca!
How full of far away seductiveness
that word – my mother never used it.
Only four, but salt crystals were sown
into the furrows on my forehead:
I worked hard imagining big beasts
ploughing my fields. Away in Tapioca!
But my father kept popping up…
Sweating and steaming he kept
popping up in the blue kitchen doorframe.
Only four, and I still couldn’t count
so I know he stood there countless times,
shouting: “The war is over!”
It never was.
2. Wartime
Yesterday, with black and white bulls
stampeding through the twilight
of the late night western – yesterday
I recalled the tapioca never tasted,
the puddings my mother never made.
But how could she? My father kept
stampeding into her kitchen, yelling
about a war that was over.
To this day he keeps going on
as if there were a finished past.