Come, Come, Whoever You Are
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.
by Rumi
Stop that Escalator
This world is a machine and so is everything in it.
We churn each other out daily. You have no use if you cannot be used usefully.
The machine loves machines.
An escalator extracted is a motorized spinal column.
Even when it is paralyzed you can scale them.
The epitome of convenience, they never make you wait.
Once you make that first step, though, there’s no turning back
unless you want to make a fool of yourself
like a kid or a disoriented grandmother
moving two steps up for every one you take down.
This Ethiopian woman will not be given a name in this poem.
Because, after she takes that first step on the escalator,
which leads to her terminal at the Bole International Airport,
she will only be referred to as “Ethiopian woman”
when the brief blurb of her ‘termination’ is written
about her by the young staff writer that was assigned her story.
He will squeeze and twist off a black head and flick it towards the printer
close his eyes and listen closely to see if he can hear its microscopic echo against the machine. He will keep his eyes closed long enough to chase a fleeting creative burst on how he can say “electrocuted”, “burned”, and “steel rods” in a different way that doesn’t make this write up sound like the last Ethiopian woman from a week ago. He will let out his stale Winston, coffee, doughnut concoction of an exhale, three parts composed of disregard, indifference, and exhaustion of hearing labor worker stories like these.
I saw her contemplating that first step on to that escalator. Stared at her
staring at that monster with Brontosaurus teeth waiting to swallow her whole. The traveler in me almost told her to get on with it already. The poet in me saw something beautiful and realized immediately that she could take as long as she wanted if getting on with it meant her 30 degree ascension to the end of her life.
We let murderers have a last cigarette and meal.
The least we can do is stop
those wretched loud speaker announcements, (Those people should have come to the airport on time.)
the squeaking of our luggages’ wheels,
the incessant need to rush,
the taxiing of planes, the boarding and de-boarding,
just for a second.
Let this Ethopian woman stare at this moving staircase
as it carries her to the last weeks of her days as a machine,
one that is churned out daily and used and reused until all used up.
BY DORIAN ‘PAUL D’ ROGERS
