Gabriel

Are you waiting to be adult to respond? Will I, will we have to wait a long time?

Have you been forbade response, I not allowed response, something or other inappropriate about it – my being African and Bahamian, your being European and Belgian maybe - or is it age, 15 up against 55? What relationship has these numbers to each other - one into the other and what chemical reaction?

Why not a word from you? You have my e-mail account. It’s in my poetry book. I haven't got yours. All I have is the one time I saw you, two photographs we took together, your family and you and I in Granada, Nicaragua, that day of the carnival of writers.

You were on the porch of the embassy, among the people gathered there, porch upon which and from which Ernesto Cardenal, then Yevgeny Yevtushenko read. Unable to understand Spanish at all very well,
I saw you and understood immediately, the book of your beauty entirely.

Afterwards, from the middle of the road, where the poets processed and from where we read, I kept trying to find you among the crowd, keeping up or just ahead, along the side of the road. How I searched whenever I lost you until I had you in view again.

Idea to approach you to tell you how pretty you were and afterwards, to provide you a copy of Christmas Lights, containing 145 of my poems and my 23 drawings, were life-enhancing decisions.

Idea to have Indran Amirthanayagam, fellow poet from Sri Lanka, photograph us together, was not mine. That was Jalal El Hakmaoui’s idea, poet from Morocco. He noticed how helplessly and how hopelessly in love I was and thought I needed at least a photograph to hold me up, to hold on to.

In it I notice that our hips, side by side, are pressed together, you and I a couple though with your family, we are a group.

Is there some reason why I have not heard from you, one you can share with me? Must I wait until I'm sixty, until you're twenty?


© Obediah Michael Smith, 2009
1:18 a.m. 20.08.09