tin_can_telephone’s Weblog

Your cheap plywood door swings light on pewter hinges
Gray of cement punctuated by spots red
And the hiss and tick of sprinklers, water
Slapping against the window like branches.
And fog parts on another clear day,
Tempo kept on earthen brick.

Cement slops heavy into a mold, the truck of bricks
Heavy-laden, axles squeaking like those pewter hinges
Two days in the sun, children playing in well-water
Seeping into the earth now a much deeper red
And potholes punctuate branches
Just as they did yesterday.

Income rose high, years ago a heyday
On the edge of town, imported water
Purified in India, checks went to branches
In China. They don’t want our crumbling bricks.
They don’t need our pewter hinges.
No one knows our brilliant Kwacha, dawn’s red.

Like the lines in your eyes, red
Like the walls made of brick
Glass shards will due where electricity’s branches
Have yet to reach. Streams of well-water
Trickle on as constellations yield to the day,
Bending round corners like doorframes and hinges.

Skin, skin. Elbows likes hinges
Darkest of brown and sharpest of brick.
Laughter and dirt, there’s blue in the red.
The dirt-painted children, an elongated playday
The waving of arms, skinny as branches
Leeches, ringworms, and Victoria’s waters.

There’s lead in this paint and now in the water.
And there’s love in this house though hingeless
A father. Remember the lizard we found, with belly all red?
We stalked him and snatched right off of the brick.
“Muli Shani” we cry at the start of the day.
How we laughed and we joked and swung from low branches.

I’ll remember white paint on red signs, branches up from the graves
Squeaky bus-door hinges and brick-building to clear watery eyes.
Funerals are no friend of the day.