I Don’t Know Anything About Suffering
By Aaron Brown
As in losing three children to a sickness you can’t even name,
as in losing your baby boy
five days after birth
while you rode a market truck coming home to see him,
as in saying that a dead child has
returned
rather than died
(as if that could make it all easier)
as in riding the back of a motorbike and hitting an acacia tree,
the chain or the wheel snapping your femur,
as in waking every morning to the sound of your children dying
(from whooping cough)
as in walking the fields at noon to glean a bowlful of grain –
how painful when your husband
never returned from the war and the journey he made
across the desert to find a job in Geneina,
to marry the second wife
so much younger,
she didn’t bear a stillborn three years in like you –
as if you weren’t trying, as if you didn’t want to please him
as if every dead and dying thing was
under your control
and you could make the clouds drop rain and breathe life
into a brittle carcass by the roadside,
as if you could even begin to think with a mind that for once
wasn’t parched as in the road you walk to your field
every morning, several kilometers away,
joining with the others
who bear the same blows, have the same cracks, who sweep
the endless horizon with their eyes and reach
their jagged arms
to the single cloud that won’t let go, won’t seal up earth’s scars,
though everyone asks it why.