I regard the faces of those circled there around the fire, and then I look off unto the sky.
The night is a chorus of possibilities converging or diverging themselves from us...
Humankind.
And the deserts that we attempt to inhabit...
Or the ones that inhabit us...
Somehow retain their determining influence within our hearts...
And over our actions...
Because we allow them to do so.
A veiled woman brings more wine unto the collective and methodically proceeds to fill the wooden cups that are lifted with tired expectation.
When she comes to me, I turn my cup over and place it upon the desert sand.
Her eyes plead some unnecessary apology.
I stand and I gently take the jug of wine that she holds, and with a wave of the arm invite her to take my place beside the fire.
She is flailing somewhere between complaint, adherence to the rule, and gratitude within the words that she offers up unto the night sky.
Her words gather together with swirls of smoke and firelight and begin the perilous ascent unto ether as I slowly move away from the circle.
I do not belong in it anymore than she should need to exist outside of it.
Do I seem generous, caring, or kind to you?
I assure you that I am not.
I am above all a human being, which should speak for itself.
I gather my cloak up about my shoulders and step out into the desert...
Once more.
One or two of the ones seated beside the fire call after me.
"Where are you going?!"
And then, rather more furtively...
"Did you see that? Where does he think he's going?"
The winds gather at my side as I leave the circle in my wake.
A cluster of stars somehow remains unobscured, despite covetous sands rising to convolute.
There is the sting of stygian starts singing on the stars...
For any start in the desert is really just a continuation of something else...
Some previously rendered grace...
Or atrocity...
A continuation of the slow and eternal procession of starts...
Unto ends.
*****
I can still see the woman in my mind's eye, if not in my heart.
Such is the effect of spatial and temporal objectivity.
She is sitting beside me in the car.
We are speeding through the desert.
We are speeding unto the centre.
We had a dream.
We wanted to make love violently on a stone...
A kind of altar that we would use...
To transcend...
Beneath the burning sun.
There is the static of lustful anticipation on the air.
Almost palpable.
I have placed my hands at ten and two upon the steering wheel.
The journey promises everything and never speaks of endings.
She extends her hand unto my...
Devils of dust swirl all around us as we speed by...
As we speed unto...
Destination.
At a certain point she asks absently...
"Aren't you going to do anything about all of those bugs on the windshield?"
I turn my eyes away from the intoxicating distance to regard the woman for a spell.
Distance gasps as if in recognition of a truth.
I say nothing.
*****
In ancient places, ancient ideals still exist...
Like love...
Like faith...
In those around you.
Despite the roots of conflict surging unto sky through fissures in the earth.
I came upon the woman and the little boy shortly after dawn.
She was swallowed whole within her robes, down on her hands and knees...
Scrubbing and digging blood away from a small circle of earth with the raw fingers of one hand and a brush made of goat hair grasped tightly in the other.
The boy, perhaps three or four years old, sat upon a stone beside her...
Expressionless.
There had been heavy fighting in the ancient city all through the night.
There was desolation and proof of modern humanity's inability to evolve beyond conflict everywhere...
"I am not an actor here... I am not a participant in any of this," I told myself again and again like some insipid mantra wont to coil its numbing tentacles around my mind and my heart.
I hadn't had a clear understanding of why I had been needed there, so far north...
But there I was.
And after all, I had done what I'd been told to do.
I fumbled for a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of my tattered cargo pants, but then remembered that I do not smoke.
The language of this woman and the boy, whom I presumed to be her son, is not my own.
But I know a few phrases and so I try, despite the mantra...
To be a human being.
"You need help?" I asked.
She desisted her labours and slowly, cautiously looked up at me.
"Who are you?" She asked.
"I person."
"Why you help me?"
I used my hands to try to render something like a circle between us...
"People."
She sighed deeply and beckoned her son unto her.
He came off of the stone and entered her embrace.
After a heavy moment, during which they both wept without tears, she looked on me once more.
"What can you do?"
"I have car. I go south... to border. You want to go border? I go further, but bring you to border. You want border?"
She regarded her son once again and this time tears came when she wept.
Somewhere the riotous calls of devils were muted...
For a spell.
"Yes, we want to go to the border. Thank you."
I spent six hours in a jeep with the woman and her boy.
We scarcely spoke.
The boy wanted to wear my hat.
I had placed it on the console in between me and the empty seat beside me.
The woman had chosen to sit in the back seat with her son.
The boy kept smiling at me in the rear view mirror and pointing at the hat.
Finally, I smiled back and gave him the hat.
And in that same rear view mirror, I regarded the woman.
Her eyes were like almond satellites...
Seeking signs of life.
She was staring out the window, as we sped by the war-hollowed spectre of the country of her birth...
Where she had lived...
Where she had loved...
And where somehow both of these had been put asunder...
Utterly...
By conflict.
People make the mistake of believing deserts to be innately empty.
This is not so.
It is only war that renders them so...
But even then...
Not empty.
Just vast spaces...
Haunted by the dead.
When we came unto the border, I park the jeep, disengage the engine, and get out.
The woman gathers her son in her arms, that the two of them are now swallowed up in her robes.
They ripple out of the vehicle.
The sun is still high in the sky.
Somewhere devils are murmuring...
There is a refugee shelter and support centre some fifty meters from where we stand.
I point unto the place, and she nods in recognition of it.
The woman kisses her son upon his head and steps away from him.
She comes unto me and says, "I have no money to thank you."
I say nothing.
I merely place my hand upon my heart and bow my head unto her.
When I look up, she steps closer and regards me fully with her eyes.
She places her palm unto my cheek and I could almost imagine a smile beneath her veil, for her eyes were singing some gentle, healing song.
Then she and the boy walked together...
Wearily but somehow hopefully...
Unto the shelter.
I looked unto the sky, extended my arms wide like wings, and closed my eyes.
"Somewhere there is grace," I thought...
"Sometimes."
When I lowered my head and turned to go, I noticed that the windshield of the jeep was littered...
Or adorned...
With countless dead bugs.
I never saw the woman or the boy again.
*****
Wandering the desert, vast
I am at last returned
in circles are these shadows cast
Where we drift, and burn
taken by the ear for naughtiness
dragged along the stair
and then condemned for haughtiness
as if i'm even there
to exercise the fibrous haunt
our history instilled
o'er which preen and flaunt
the hides of those you've killed
i am increasingly disaffected
come late unto the hearth within
at how your heart is disconnected
from the life you're living in
at horizon there is a rising fire
a circle of travellers beckon nigh
amid the dross they're reaching higher
bloodied earth unto the sky
and somewhere there's a boy who wears my hat
though you never believed in me
it is through deeds that love's begat
through all this warring history
*****
I am in a café in Kampala.
I am waiting for the one.
She told me recently about how those who live in the city...
When things become to difficult to exist...
Can return unto the villages...
And even thus persist...
In living.
As I sip my coffee, I wonder at the past.
I think of borders and of states.
The ones that do and do not last.
It somehow all equates...
To people.
The world is division.
Languages and cultures e'er divide.
And yet we reveal in unison.
All the things we fight to hide...
Our oneness...
Our connectedness...
Because nobody is willing to take a chance...
Or invest any hope, faith, or trust...
To join the great and human dance...
And risk it all...
For us.
I take another sip of my coffee.
I glance across the way.
I see a woman and a man...
Together lurched over the hood of their car.
Scrubbing in circles for all they are...
Or hope to be...
In some perversion or perpetuation of...
Human...
History...
Slavishly...
To wipe away the litter of dead bugs on the windshield...
Of a car...
