Dad

When you got off the plane the heat

Hit you like a wet rag, and

The dark boy called Chief said, we ain't in Kansas anymore, ladies.

You got called Sherman, because of your glasses.

The first night the rain came, you said, it came hard,

and you were afraid.

You didn't use the ponchos

Because the sounded like dice in a tin cup:

(a dead giveaway gives way to dead).

The first night the rain came was black as

The spaces in between stars,

Black as an Asian eye,

Black as the inside of a body or a gun.

You didn't use the flashlights;

(Too bright, you said, too bright).

Dimly greening in the jungle you found mysterious

Leaves the glowed eye-bright,

Bioluminescing tokens that you tacked

To the backs of your helmets to keep track of one another.

You must have resembled and army of elf-men

Winding wayward through the trees

In your apple; peacock; olive drab.

(Inconspicuous prey).

What would the enemy have though to see

Your throng?

In the gloom with their feet wet and the skin

Becoming raisin-rot inside their shoes,

Their insides parched, their mossy outsides slipping down

Their skeletons; would they have spooked?

Would they have taken you for ancestral spirits, or

Is the trick of the glowing leaves known to them?

Your 36th day out, the tall blonde one

Shot a buffalo in its bulbous eye,

No reason.

When the bullet sang through you,

You said you contemplated god, didn't you.

Why was it, again, that you

Decided not to pray?