Helicopter                                                                                                                 

In a torn hunk of dirt it kneels,

gutted for parts

but still a thing to reckon with

for everyone who was there the day it fell.

There isn’t much else to fix on.

A few people try to grow something to eat,

scoring the soil with tools strung together

from pepper tree limbs. A spindly black dog,

listing sidewise through the ragged bush,

picks over bitter leaves for a stray bug or two.

And adolescent ex-militia, now rigged out

in police gear, idly dot the dusty clay patch

where one road chops north to Gbarnga,

and the other to yet more dust. 

Snarled weeds, snug as hothouse

orchids, teem in the split glass nose.

Kids shimmy in to pretend they are

commandoes diving over the fields

of Lofah, howling blades whipping

their ears to frenzy. I hear one small

boy say he wishes the war were still on

so that he could have his chance to fly.

I understand him. After all, it is

the biggest, grandest gadget he has

ever known. He was not even born

when the blades ground their

counter-orbit to the steep ungainly

descent.  He would not have seen much

of the war that he can rightly recall.

Its habit is simply embedded in him—

like always expecting nothing, no

matter how hungry you get.

He tells me a famous warlord can drop                                                                     

aircraft from the sky, like this one,

by a leisurely force of will, easily as you

or I might drop yam seed into a hole, Ma. 

The claim is no less absurd than

the want of seeds here, where they are

needed most and the land is least

receptive.  Something in me wants to

slap the air and scream for an exodus,

as if anywhere else existed.

I imagine the speedometer has been

wired into the dash of a lopsided bus

resurrected by a church group.  And

the engine, slugged into the belly of a

half-eaten barge.  I am momentarily

surprised that, in this scarce place,

the dented husk has not become shelter

for someone with nowhere else to go. 

As we set out toward the rising night,

I notice a pitchfork across the road,

shoved upright into the mud, guarding

the vacant field.

Oakland Out Loud (Jukebox Press, 2007, ISBN 0932693172)

poets.com, 2000