Fall 2011 | Issue 21

20 | The Berlin Journal | Number Twenty-One | Fall 2011
NEW
POEMS
By Tom Sleigh
KIBERA
I made, as usual, the usual mistake:
I was asking about the heart rather than the eye:
a picture of Jesus’s heart tacked high on one wall
of the tiny shack among a million tiny shacks,
the heart one of the 3D kind that if you look at it
from one angle glows with holy light but if you cock
your head just so sheds big bloody tear-shaped drops.
That’s when the young man who lived there, my guide,
took me to see the orphans who sang a rehearsed song
that wavered in the ear, faces remote, hard to read,
ribs slatted through skin as if the body was a blind
keeping light from pouring in.
Meanwhile, the heart, undaunted,
kept imposing itself – wanted to call them “a fearful stain”
who “can’t go home again.” But looking through the eye,
you see it differently.
And then I thought, How differently?
The way a fly sees, multiplying one roof furrow
into a vast mosaic jittering that is itself
a kind of wonder, a pulsing surge of roof glitter
the heart falls down before, not knowing what to say?
Or the way a mosquito’s many lenses
see overlapping images, hands, arms, faces
in a kind of tantric whirl?
Or like eyespots
of algae, called stigma, the same as Jesus’s
wounds, that float in the polluted stream smelling
of goat and human shit, and that propel themselves
toward regions of more concentrated light
so as to work in microscopic factories to
manufacture oxygen that even the highest
of highrises must breathe?
The kids I was giving
suckers to weren’t smiling or reacting –
they stood there
staring, just as I was staring, their wary human stares
before singing all together, as the orphanage women
cued them, Hello, dear visitor, welcome, how are you?
And maybe that’s all that I could see – just their impersonal
alertness when they stuck the suckers in their mouths,
sucking for the calories as much as the sweetness
my guide said.
But day or night, if you could look through
the eyes without the heart, you’d see the eye cure
itself of blindness by the discharge of fluid from itself;
you’d see the blind regaining sight after being blind
for twenty years;
you’d see some who are born blind
without any visible defect in the eye.
And if you were dying
in your hut or up in your highrise, and you could silence
the heart, the right thing to do would be for someone
to close your eyes as you died and open them again
on your funeral pyre since it isn’t right that any
human being should see the eyes at the moment
of dying or that the eyes not be open to the flames.