Poem By Betsy
The haunting hollow call to prayer echoes from the mosque on the opposite hill.
It hits me in the evening on my memory foam mattress,
ankles stained with red dust,
fingers dry from hand sanitizer.
In the mornings I hear church choirs sometimes,
and birds that sound like crying babies,
and roosters that will crow at any hour of the day (or night).
Hip-hop blasts from cars
and wind rustles the feathers of the storks in the trees.
I’ll miss the sounds,
even the rain hitting the metal rooftops,
even the cries of goats.
I’ve found in the sound a kind of quietness somehow,
and I think it’s because behind the birds and cars and music
is silence:
no endless New York hum,
no great gray backdrop of highways and jackhammers.
Here each sounds floats like a cloud of color
on an otherwise empty canvas,
like a tropical birds flying in a clear sky.
So when I sit on my bed in the night,
dirt under my fingernails,
sweat on my lip,
mosquito bites on my knuckles,
I bathe in the pure sounds of Uganda,
Africa,
sing to me ’til I’m clean.
BY Betsy Brown
USA
