Wake up poppet,

Don’t you lie around,

Your friends are calling out,

They wanted you at the playground.

Do not exude that lachrymose look,

Go out frolic.

Give me no excuses:

Your shanks are weak

The sinews excruciatingly ache.

Come tomorrow,

Holiday ends,

Slinging the satchel,

In new habiliments

That I bough for a change,

You are off to school,

And you bet, you ought to learn quick,

All the useful tools

That would one-day reverse,

The fortune of this wretched house of yours.

No! Don’t mention, I do not want to know:

That your visions are clouded with films of snow,

Your head feels hollow,

You are picking up things too slow.

Your looks gaunt,

And at the back lacerations have begun to show.

Don’t you mention all these; I don’t want to know!

Oh God! Have mercy.

This is not it again!

That insidious microscopic vulture

That had already claimed

The life of a soigné daughter of mine.

You! Cursed virus AIDS, you savage,

I’m outraged.

Don’t push me to the edge.

Make no mistake, I take umbrage

You have taken a sylph daughter

Long before I saw her caparisoned for marriage.

And you, the Master of Heaven!

You showered me with troubles:

When I least suspect, bombs from above,

Famine flood from the ground

I nearly got drowned.

And now this recrudesce

Of a deadly virus,

My progenies are afflicted with.

To pull through, they got no second chance.

Bete noire, odium

If you think that I am,

Then leave me alone,

It may feel forlorn --

Take your religion,

Your altar,

Raze the worshipping place

Or, if you wish, take it somewhere else

I could leave like an animal

With no spiritual dress,

All the same.

Or, if you like,

Turn me to cadaver compost,

No regret, I have lived out my useful life,

Longer than most.

But, this poppet, this boy,

He is the only one I’m left with,

Upon my dead body,

I will not countenance you destroy.

He is my brunch, my late supper

After insufferable long day of labour.

He is my home,

I hoped to live secured and warm.

He is my day and night,

My eternal clock

Long after I’m gone it should continue to work.

Above all, thou is my Cane, walking bed,

Round the clock, I stretch my back

And let my head to rest

When I am alive and when I’m dead.

Give me the kitchen knife with serrated teeth,

A bucket full of water,

And the plastic glove,

From head to bottom I shall dress

I will mince and flash the nefarious virus to death.

Tell God, if you think he is on my side

It is time he comes for help.

Copyright Haileselassie Girmay

31/12/2000