Parent-Teacher Association,
Unification Town

Like Robin Blaser's boy
Denied the truth of
F U C K
I was whipped
When Tutugirl told her mother
I had said P U S S Y.
But I was only saying the
Recitation which we were taught
By Teacher Richard
About Little Robin Redbreast who was
Chased by Pussy Cat up a tree.
Tutugirl's mother swore
Not to send her child to a
Rude school and
Mother and her friends talked to
Teacher Richard—
To keep the Cat-Robin chase
From "that Thing."

Sin

Down gravel
On to white sand
By the changeable-letter sign
Proclaiming Robertsfield Baptist Church
Up hard red earth
On to white sand again
Gravel again
Left, by the pile of bricks
This side entrance of the Church
Faces the open cemented
Rectangle tank
Of water
Foreground of our pretense
Imaginary greenhouse where
Ewa and me, as her husband
Steering wheel in hand
Vibration against palate
For motor-engine sound
All imaginary
My baptismal
A trick
For use of the Church's P. O. Box 6
To reconnect with Ewa
To grow again our garden
Site of the betrayal of innocence
Said the Pastor
A convenient sermon
Week of our expulsion
Where the Devil entered an innocent houseplay
Turned blooms of red hibiscus to meal
To an imaginary light bulb
Held up by the girl  

Sitting by the white-robed "Saints" humming 
Our tears were Niles
Ferrying us from this church-place
As an imaginary bulb in an imaginary night
To which her tired hand let fall the bloom
On his side of the imaginary bed
A petal torn, and a green stem loose
The crashed bloom for the most part remained whole
But the broken petal
Feigned an awful showing
The rest of the petals had to go  

Craned the stamen
Uncraned by his
Slight push and pull of the green stem . . .
Balancing himself against my drenched newness
The Pastor pronounces
The Devil's trick to snatch this soul has failed. 

Raindance

1

                   Before it comes
                  Comes the warning
                  Wind growing in intensity
                  Imagining myself as Comfort
As her palm-fronds of hair is pulled back
Her eyes to slits

                  It comes singly
                  Soft warning drops
It will wait until I am home Goes the thought
                  Afternoon windbrushes into evening
I am the sketch before the canvas’ next color

                  But it waits not without growl

At home a spectator in time for the windowshow
As the electric light yields to its greater other
Switches on and off
In roars of half thoughts

Wheelbarrow in the Embassy 

Two eternal violets of ideas
Haiti & Liberia
The former, more so
The latter, an elephant of grass, gold and all
Bastard of a weed. 
And this presence
Of Hannah Musgrave
Sitting, facing the consulship who
With her passport in hand
Had squeezed by
Between a grand walnut-finished executive desk
And the wall;
Had squeezed between a rich-walnut Gunlocke chair
Sandwiched between the desk and a wheelbarrow's bottom
Handles against the wall. 
This presence
On this 152nd anniversary week of Liberia
Her national seal hangs adjacent to
The leaning wheelbarrow
Declaring the pioneer's ship's arrival, shore-view 
People-less land of an upright wheelbarrow
Accompanied by a shovel scooped halfway into virgin earth. 
And this presence of a lone wheelbarrow faced-wall
Minus a shovel
In this embassy, the basement of a house
Should a fire be the dread hand of this arrangement? 

is

Up on Narrows Road North reads
West 278 Staten Is

                  Is
Abbreviation of necessity
Seized
Transformed
Verbalized
                  is

Staten is
Fragment poses?
Opposes a simple object
Seeks meaning
Interposing Now and Then 


These poems are taken from Naxela's soon-to-be-published collection of poems, is: Memory and Migration.