The roof took off long ago.
So did the south wall.
Doctors in muddy white
pace and shiver.
Nobody starts a fire
from wood in the rubble.
The tallest guy stalks about
with a quivering stick,
dowsing for a buried trickle
of fresh water.
Only weeds bubble
from cracked concrete.
Wind really wouldn’t mind wailing.
It remembers Indian girls
sawing off fat braids
for dead braves
stuck in bleaching bones.
But there’s not enough air.
It just has to keep on sighing.
Hands in gritty pockets,
a doctor faces south.
In the black hunger,
his grandmother peddled icons
made without hands.
It was no help.
She still ate mud and drank piss
in homes blown apart like tepees in a twister.
J. TARWOOD has been a dishwasher, a community organizer, a medical archivist, a documentary film producer, an oral historian, and a teacher. Much of his life has been spent in East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Currently living in China, he has published four books, The Cats in Zanzibar, Grand Detour, And For The Mouth A Flower, and What The Waking See, and his poems have appeared in magazines ranging from American Poetry Review to Visions. Currently living in China, he has always been an unlikely man in unlikely places.