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Waiting for a Terrorist


by Lori Lou Freshwater


 

Tents staked in desert land, a muted building

of parched earth, in a thirty year old city with a napalm

birth, they wait among gravestones in the sand.

 

Gypsies don't roam, children play in dust, illusions

of home.  A woman teaches without books, invisible

unless sand floors turn black, turn into liquid money.

 

The thousand-mile wall holds. We want to go home,

not until they own oil or terrorists.  Nations clamor

for phosphate and fish, families live a barren existence.

 

In a London room an electric guitar screams Saharan

poetry across the street from a market waiting for sardines,

gathered from stolen sea.  Seven hundred miles from a Saharawi

 

woman who rations water for children too large for her breasts.  

Eighty miles away the sun has moved, a tourist turns her back

for a more exquisite angle, as ocean laps a canary island.



~Originally published in the Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine
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