Kaya Oakes
The Western Child
Full force of casual living breeds a lethargy
five generations could not bother to sweep clean.
This is evidence that we loved what passed for work:
how much involved joy in making
would bend our elbows and permanently wound
our wrists.
We had learned to speak so young
that every conversation was a ripe stream
running through eucalyptus groves where the coffins
of the dead were buried soggy at its side. We drank this water.
Parks were places where dirt migrated
underneath your toenails; the same kind of dirt
that fed a nation weak from agitations
and spewing out its young. Nobody made us promises
so we expected little; we ran in tattered redwood chips
and scraped our hands on monkeybars
from which the sun had bleached the chips of paint.
Underneath our skin those paint chips bloomed.
We turned blue, turned green, turned the ochre
of the public school. We loved everything so well
that we accomplished little, and satisfaction came from
respite. The sun went down five thousand times
above the water, and in the ocean carcinogens
were as delicious as the many plants
we tore free from the ground.