The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Dana Crum

The Gods of Darfur

Around the smoldering huts of Hamada, the dead smudge brown grass: naked babies with bashed-in faces; charred schoolgirls bound together and burned alive; gelded men who bled to death, their voices, thin like wind through a cracked window, whispering to Allah.

What gods there are have killed them. But no
hyacinths sprout from their blood.

The gravest danger I face? A woman from match. Biracial with gray eyes and corkscrew curls, she drank half a cappuccino at Starbucks on Sunday and can destroy me by not returning my call.

What gods there are have killed them. And I —
I have done nothing.

I touch the thick muscle beneath my breast and feel it pumping, pumping, pumping blood to my arms, legs, head, chest.  

Abandoned

Some believe there is a hand that whips
the winds into hurricanes, a fist
that gives the sky the occasional black eye.
If God does exist, it can only be

that he left us and found a new and younger universe
to shoot his comets through. And if
he paid Earth a visit for old time's sake,
would anything here interest him? Would he,

wearing the stratus clouds like a wind-blown cape,
stroll across the continents
and hop over the seas? Would he
pluck palm trees from beaches and, in one blasting breath,

blow their fronds off like a child blowing seeds
off a dandelion? Maybe. But if so, his one wish would be
that his new universe has not left him
for a God with a gentler touch.