© RainJustice

From Hesse:

You brothers, who are mine.
Poor people, near and far,
Longing for every star,
Dream of relief from pain.
You, stumbling dumb at
Night as pale stars break,
Lift your thin hands for
Some hope, and suffer
And wake. Poor,
Muddling commonplace.
You sailors who must live
Unstarred by hopelessness,
We share a single face.
Give me my welcome back.

A Swarm of Gnats

Many thousand glittering motes
Crowd forward greedily together
In trembling circles.
Extravagantly carousing away
For a whole hour rapidly vanishing.
They rave delirious, a shrill whir,
Shivering with joy against death.
While kingdoms, sunk into ruin,
Whose Thrones, heavy with gold,
Instantly scattered into night and
Legend, without leaving a trace,
Have never known so fierce a dancing.

First Hint

“I had to quit my job over that tornado.” Ocie resolutely told me in 1981, sitting at a long table in the employee break room; a room that, unnoticed by me, was now going gradually silent.

“That tornado,” being the monstrous F4 funnel that struck Wichita Falls, Texas in 1979, killing 42 people, causing over 1,700 injuries, destroying over 3,000 homes and leaving 20,000 homeless.

With my tactfulness, perhaps, needing a little tweaking, there in my first day as a newbie to the brand new operating unit for the, “phone company” (and new resident of Wichita Falls). I asked, “You had to quit your job over the tornado? How’d that happen? Did it hit where you worked?” (I usually asked two to three questions at a time, back then.) Ocie, shaking his head, responded slowly. "No... It didn’t… I guess that might’ve been some part of the problem.”

“Part of the problem…?” I was stumped. Until Ocie, who was black, told me that since the tornado had missed the, " black part of town," instead wreaking havoc on the most affluent (and white) areas, that people said the, “*black folks” had brought it… BROUGHT the Tornado ON the White People!"

Picking up my chin, I nervously giggled, “Oh man, that’s crazy!"
Ocie, his voice as hollow as if from some deep well, solemnly answered, “Yeah, but the white workers on my job harassed me so much over it, every day, that I finally had to quit that job.”

I was completely shocked and said, incredulously, “I can’t believe that. That is just nuts!” Seeing the warning in Ocie's face, I then began to notice that, unlike me, all the other, “white folks” sitting at that long table all seemed to be swelling up like toads.

Startled by the sudden weight of negative energy, I instinctively chose to snag that energy and use it to deflate those fat toads:

With an exaggerated conspiratorial tone, combined with a, “pre-Palin” wink, I turned to Ocie, saying, Soto Voce, “Well, you know Ocie, I DID see a picture of it and… it WAS black.” Ocie’s eyes went wide, he sucked in a breath and then, as I cackled, he joined in, looking terribly relieved and surprised by my attitude, or lack thereof.

But...we laughed alone.
None of the toads croaked in.
First hint of things to come.

*see nig***.

Thursday, January 5, 2012