Rand Bishop
Reaching Out
Your voice is sunken,
hollow in the recorder’s
low fidelity.
It tells me I’m (you’re)
not home right now but
if you (I) leave your (my) name
and number after the beep I (you)
will call you (me) back,
beep.
The beep is high, impersonal,
says lots of high tech
has gone into this effort
so would you (i) please
compose yourself (myself) and do
your (my) business now,
time is money,
you (I) have twenty seconds.
I flounder, thrown off guard
by the machine voice,
self-conscious how I’ll sound
recorded a year from now,
hating being told like
a dog now speak.
Yet I speak my prisoner of war
name and number,
start a phrase and stop,
knowing you will hear me
only after you
shelve groceries, fix a drink,
sit, listen at your leisure
to my copied voice
while I (me)
no longer think of you (you).
Ode to Baboon
Were you and your healthy
liver nearby?
Were you an excess mouth to feed
in some municipal zoo?
Or were you carefully culled
from some robust family
roaming the Ruwenzoris
and in a frenzy flown
Bujumbura-Pittsburgh,
held incommunicado
until the propitious moment?
Were you strapped down on a gurney
paralleling the man
sedated in the theatre?
Were you anaesthetized
before the scalpel slit
thorax to genitalia,
clamps hitched your hide
east and west
and the knife severed
the pulsing purple jewel
passed to the patient?
And after, did your liverless
corpus lie in state,
eulogized, get borne by hearse
to granite mausoleum?
Or did your unused organs
end up in a sack
left in a land-fill dump
in toxins, excrement and clay?
Rand Bishop has offered English courses at seven universities, primarily at the Oswego campus of the State University of New York, and including a Fulbright Professorship at the Universite Nationale du Gabon. He has published several academic articles, and African Literature, African Critics (Greenwood Press).