A Haircut In The Village

[beekaay]

The barber’s face shows no expression.
He is older than I by several years
And a native of this village,
Nothing in common with me,
The foreigner, the Dai Uy in his chair
Nothing in common except this haircut
And the dead woman in the square.

The barber glances toward the square
As his scissors work, wondering
The things people wonder about
A dead woman lying in a market square.
I wonder how she got there, because
We are far down river from where we killed her.

We can't see the dead woman in the square,
The barber and I,
Only hear the sound of the voices
That surround her,
An angry choir singing rage and grief.
That sound, and the sound of the barber’s scissors,
Snip-snip-snip
In time with the sorrow song.

Westward
Beyond the dead woman in the square
Lies the sea, the open sea.
I think about the sea often,
The clean, open sea, so close
At the mouth of this river
That storm waves roll in to the village
And the river tides here are sea tides.

Sometimes, a ship’s mast breaks the horizon
And I stare until earth’s great curve
Hides it again, trying to remember
What it was like to sail the clean, open sea.
I think about the sea often.

But not on this day.

On this day,
I think about the dead woman in the square
And how she died
The barber is finished with scissors
By my order
And now his razor is on my neck
Because in the dark
I can feel it scraping, scraping
On this river
Slowly, so slowly
She was the enemy.
In time with the sorrow song

*****

And, in the nighttime, in the dark, in all the sleeping silence of the earth, the river, the dark rich river, full of strange time, dark time, strange tragic time, is flowing, flowing out to sea!

Thomas Wolfe, The Web And The Rock

[mnaz]

We met the enemy many armies and fears ago, and generally she looked familiar.

[beekaay]

And she still does...