Читать книгу How to Be Eaten by a Lion - Michael Johnson - Страница 8

In Praise of Pain

Fluent in dialects of mantis and chameleon,

we lay reading cloud hieroglyphs,

listening to insects gossip in the grass

beneath the largest nest we’d ever seen.

We believed beetles the ant-world gods,

all inkblot and iridescence and poise—

dung, rhino, stag—surely immortal.

But our friend’s goliath had died that day.

Too out of its element, its rainforest home

where leopards whiskered the shadows.

No one mentioned loneliness.

The innumerable live, the rare die.

A million wasps, one less was not tragic.

So we visited that nest with stoic anger,

six kids with slingshots, six missiles, all true.

One cleft the papery hull and lit their rage.

Our second salvo plummeted the nest

to a marakuja thicket, were it emerged,

rolling, gathering momentum

toward the terraces and workwomen.

And we, watching, fired on. We anticipated pain

as they welled in a demented cloud.

Instead, they went to work on the women,

and followed them, screaming, to the creek.

And this one girl resurfaced—

the pastor’s lessons fresh in her:

in all things praise Him—screaming praises

to the wasps, the pain, through her tears:

Bwana asifiwe! Praise the Lord.