The rose from Ethiopia’s virgin lands
for Julio Monteiro Martins on the threshold of another kind of land
Vacant is the land
Barren is the land
Wasteland, wasted land
Unproductive barren womb
“We’ll make the desert bloom!”
Until the god of capital grabs it
Inseminates it
Makes it bear gold
In Wall Street and Abu Dhabi
And the fast train of twenty-first
Century progress
Feasts on Ethiopian buffalo and donkey
And thegoat and the mule
To make roses grow where the cows
Used to roam
And strawberry, and peppers and rice
For supermarkets in Ottawa and Rome
Cargill, Cargill, Cargill
Prostrate in front of our new god
And the pastoral kids
Food aid in their plates
Learn their A B Cs
In Unicef notebooks
Not under clear African skies
But under steel structures
The crow staring in from the window
Hawks flying overhead
Free riding the currents
Beware the virgin rose
Beware the troubled land
Lest stock market hollow men
Bulldoze the soul
Of that barren land, the wasteland
Invisible the hand of the market
Grabbing the empty land
Teeming with invisible
Cows, goats, shepherd,
Where for thousand years
The passing of animals, women
And men and children who called the water
With a stick and heard its song
Of life and transit
On the soft rails of land
The trail that would slip underground
When the rain would wash it into a river
And you could grab it no more
That land that sprouted a thorny flower
to the mules’s delight
That land that sprouted tender grass
Calves so relished
Land the color of man
And woman and child
Land the color of cow and sheep
And goat and donkey
Pastoralists they call them
Empty is their land where millions of hoofs
And sandals have treaded the millennia
Now suddenly turned into wasteland, virgin land
For the stock market to deflower
And the pastoralist forever moving
And grabbing space
And when the grass grows brown
And the earth’s belly needed to get round
They’d strike a few flames
And guide the delicate red fingers
Just to the edge of the forest
And then pull back because the mighty trees
And the bushes, and the vine and the sticks
Are what makes our lungs feed the blood and the limb
And you must render honor unto them
And not to the god of Wall Street
And not to the god of Abu Dhabi
Or turbaned millionaires
And not to the fast transit
That’ll take you in a jiffy to Financial Center
And its towers that scrape the sky
We scrape the land, bits of land to put food
Teff, enjeera and mutton and vegetable on the table
Yet Abu Dabhi’s Stock Exchange demands
The rose, the rose, the rose,
Black hands tend it, cut it
Then store it in the hold and off it flies
To five continents
The pastoralist land of Ethiopia has birthed the rose
And Bengali children sell it at street corners
New York, Paris, Berlin, London, Rome
The desert has bloomed
In the hands of the Bengali child
And the by now withering rose
Is a real deal, half a euro
For your soul
Half a dollar for the ghost
Of the breath of the goat
Trapped like dew in the petal of the rose.
Pina Piccolo, 18 December 2014