Malaria Poems: Okapi

“The war against infectious disease has been won.³”

— 1969

Okapi

I know the field of grass

is green but my eyes

know different knowings. 

To them green burns black

and white sun splinters

blades like bad memory

or the legs of the okapi

the students work to draw

from inside their hut.

The teacher carries on

her head a basket of stones

and gives each student one.

Your own stone, she says,

has all you’ll ever need

to draw the great animal.

Feel its shapes in your hands.

See its shadows on the paper.

Trace its ridges as a compass.

Press it hard and it will give

itself until it is no longer.

I see students tap pencils.

Hear them groan at the task.

But cast in the air’s canvas

is the gang-raped teacher

who tells me only that it was

“by more than ten” last week.

Who tells me the choice: stay

home and starve or leave

to fields for food and be raped.

Something about the silence

of a place where wails were.

Something about how violence

seals itself silently within us

and we sometimes carry on.

3. U.S. Surgeon General William H. Stewart, 1969. Quoted: Peoria Magazines, The Crisis of Antibiotic Resistance. Jonathan Wright. 05/2012. http://www.peoriamagazines.com/ibi/2012/may/crisis-antibiotic-resistance