Our work begins not long before dusk,
When we launch our caïque into the Bay of Matsala.
All about us are birds that wintered in Africa:
Storks, swallows, swans, geese,
And on clear days we see the coast of Finland.

Some birds, exhausted, fall from the sky,
Or land clumsily in a crash of spray in the Bay.
But we are looking for souls of African children,
In the form of birds,
On their way to the North,
From where they will never return.

We row among the reeds and salt hay,
When hurtling earthward we see a bird-soul,
Sometimes its wings vertical,
Lacking the strength for one more beat,
Or sometimes the wings are held tight around the body,
And the bird-soul falls like a bullet.

We row frantically and extend a basket on a long pole,
Snatching the bird-soul before it strikes the water.
In our arms it quivers with weakness and cold.
It changes its shape from bird to child,
From feathers and wings
To stumps of limbs and distended belly,
But always with bewildered eyes.

We swaddle the bird-souls in flannel,
We sing lullabies in every language and dialect:
From Sierra Leone we sing in Bassa and Kissi, Kono and Limba,
In Mende and Themne,
And for the bird-souls from Côte d’Ivoire we sing lullabies
In Baoulé and Bété,
In Malinké and Sénoufo.

With our songs and our flannel
They stop shivering,
They close their eyes,
They die in our arms.

All through the dusk we pluck them from the air
With our basket on a long pole.
All through the dusk we sing lullabies
In the language of their huts,
And each dusk comes a new migration.
Each dusk our caïque is full of shrouded bird-souls
That we bury in the marsh.
We bury them according to every rite,
With a doll of straw, a swatch of cloth and beads for the girls,
With a bow and arrow for the boys.

Our work with the basket on a long pole,
With flannel and lullabies,
With dolls and bows and arrows,
Is the seawall that stands between us and despair.

September 20th, 2005