The Lost & Found

by Janet I. Buck

Wide marble pockets
made the front cover of Newsweek.
I marveled that this swarm of orphans,
barely divorced from walnut nipples,
could march a thousand miles
up hunger's chronic hill.
The Lost Boys removed
from the coffin's lip like
tea cups stuck to a saucer
of sugar gone hard.
Puckering bark leaving the poisoned tree.
We would manicure their nails,
remove the caveats of death
pressed between a moon and thumb,
pass them the white of the dream,
a French fry warmed in our oil.

America, they said,
as if we wrote this alphabet,
was the garden waving goodbye
to the thorny fence.
"God carried us";
we trust the biceps of prayer
to fumigate this carpet of blood.
Distended stomachs shrink
into the fiber of luck.
Copper we shun
in quest of the gold.
Fingers would cherish a book
the rest of us spurn like homework
on a weekend night.
A church built by littered skulls,
the lint of snapping pencil bones.
No innocent windows for eyes.
The rattle of snakes for a waltz.
Straight from the grave to a movie set.
I study the shape of their hands
tearing at skins of tangerines.

***Note:

About 17,000 Sudanese children fled their farming villages during a civil war in 1987 and began a tenuous existence in the bush. Most of the survivors were boys, as the girls were killed or sold into slavery. International refugee workers dubbed these children "The Lost Boys," after the characters in the novel Peter Pan. After months and years of starvation, hunted by lions and hyenas, living on leaves and bark, most ended up at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. They cannot return to Sudan because the war continues, their families are dead, and they have nothing to go back to. America has taken these orphans under her wing, but assimilation is a daunting task.

Janet Buck's poetry, poetics, and fiction have appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Poetry Magazine.com, CrossConnect, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Kimera, The Rose & Thorn, 2River View, Southern Ocean Review, Disquieting Muses, Urban Spaghetti, Perihelion, Mind Fire, Born Magazine, pif, 3rd Muse, Verse Libre Quarterly, Big Bridge, pith and hundreds of journals world-wide. Buck was one of U.S. poets to be featured at the "One Heart, One World" Exhibit at the United Nations Exhibit Hall in New York City in April, 2000. In January 2001, Art Villa Records released Janet's first audio CD of poetry and music called Before the Rose. It is available at: http://www.artvilla.com/shopping/poetry/rose.htm To hear a sample from the CD, go to: http://www.artvilla.com/mp3/umbrellas.mp3.
Note: Featured author in January 2001
E-mail: JBuck22874@aol.com
Writing interests: Poetry
Poems: "The Orphan", "Caught in Lesser Tragedies", "The Broken Promise", "The Gargoyle", "The Going", "The Bag Lady", "Rushing Toward Entelechy", "The Paralyzed Apocalypse", "Frozen Sonnets", "New York, New York", "Live on CNN", "America Under Siege", "Gutter Balls"
Links: Hot Links: Janet I. Buck, Janet's Latest Interview, Desideratum's Doggie Dish, Author's Den, Active Amp.org—Features Janet I. Buck, Poetry Magazine.Com-October-Janet Buck, The Part-time Postmodernist (August 2000), San Francisco Salvo, Moongate: Janet I. Buck, Offcourse, The October Country , Cafe Society: Poetry Life & Times, Kookamonga Square, The Adirondack Review , janetbuck.com, Funky Dog Publishing—Janet Buck's Strawberry Nipples, Athens Avenue—Janet I. Buck, One World-One Heart Exhibit , Ygdrasil: Issue 9 September 2000