David P. Miller
Go Back
The pale people, they who host plague from
a world across the ocean, will not go
into the rivers to wash themselves. They came
from a ship with a flower’s name. Back
in their own land, do flowers stink so? I ask you,
how many times must we show them where
to bathe? The strangers insist that linens are where
purity happens. Underclothing sucks filth from
their skins and they become clean, they believe. You
and I must shut our noses from the results. They go
to their god’s house with dirty bodies, then back
to their huts, praising. Who knows why they came?
This is not their land. I hear, where they came
from, women plaster their faces where
the pox they carry scatters pits. Keep it back,
they must, the air itself poisoned, rising from
their skins. For face-covering fat, they go
to executioners, who harvest it warm. Would you
wear carcass-fat mashed with beeswax? Would you
swallow a powder of herbs with dust that came
from an unburied skull? The high people go,
I hear, after dead youths’ body parts. Their
lusts are prolonged by eating those organs. From
that feast, they think, corpses give young years back.
What repair will they make to us? What give back?
Speak to them simply, with reason, never can you
move them to listen. The “astrologer” priests from
their land of illness and guns declare that where
sweat makes the pores open, foul air will come
in to sicken. That way their race’s beliefs go.
And we are to sit with them, smiling go
to their feast, hear them give glories back
to their god. I ask you now, where
in their faces will our guts remain calm? Can you
filter pure air away from their breaths? They came
here in what is called peace where they are from,
but we must force them to go. Tell them, you
will carry your pestilence back, with your names.
For us, nothing is good where your skins come from.
—Submitted on 09/27/2020
David P. Miller is the author of Sprawled Asleep (Nixes Mate Books, 2019) and The Afterimages (Červená Barva Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Hawaii Pacific Review, Turtle Island Quarterly, poems2go, riverbabble, and other journals. He is retired from a career in library services, and lives in Boston.
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