Liberian Literary Magazine
April Issue 0415
Jack Kolkmeyer
The Drum is the Voice of the Trees
the drum
is the voice of the trees
you taste its lilt on your hips
and hear its heartbeat
in the breeze
Jack is the author of Higher Glyphics
the drum
gives us root music
and trunk space
and leaf scatter
and branch breaking
as a symbol
of love and a constant steady rainfall
the drum
is the choice of the trees
with all due respect to fiddling
around
and bassic intentions
for the drum
keeps us up late
watching stars and flying embers
it makes us other worldly spectres
half-baked with an urge
from the heat of dancing
and then
the drum walks us home
with a surety and sprightliness of
step
and not ironically
well, perhaps iconically
right on time
to watch the moonglow
melt into the morning notes
coming from the birds and the
churches
Jimmy Carter
Why We Get Cheaper Tires from Liberia
The miles of rubber trees bend from the
sea.
Each of the million acres cost a dime
nearly two Liberian lives ago.
Sweat, too,
has poured like sap from trees, almost free,
from men coerced to work by poverty
and leaders who had sold the people's
fields.
The plantation kiln's pink bricks
made the homes of overseeing whites
a corporation's pride
Walls of the same polite bricks divide
the worker's tiny stalls
like cells in honeycombs;
no windows breach the walls,
no pipes or wires bring drink or light
to natives who can never claim this
place as theirs
by digging in the ground.
No churches can be built,
no privy holes or even graves
dug in the rolling hills
for those milking Firestone's trees, who
die
from mamba and mosquito bites.
yes, you see
the drum
I asked the owners why.
The cost of land, they said, was high.
is the voice of the trees
because
the drum
is the choice of the trees
Jimmy Carter, Always a Reckoning, 1995
Printed by permission.
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