A day so dry, as scanty as a harmattan feast
Did you hear the call, as it crows in the east?
We are the hurried children of noon and moon born,
Where are the rusted cans and sticks of sweet corn?
Sticks of sweet corn we turned into our horses
We summoned the season's harvest and losses
On the sun's back we rode daylight home to the west
Home was where we together child ourselves and rest
In our worried damp, we wear our happy mud,
With laughter, we hide the falling grains from fear's bud
Our legs in the sand we build our sand castles, smash it as we leave
Beg the thatch roof to bend its eaves, shelter the dead beneath leaves
The deepening night tells the fireflies in what eyes to glitter
How we taught beauty to woo our nightmares hither
We wake the spring of tears in the rains
O shelter the lost children who gather to play the train
They who still trade in the markets of yesterday
No more to shine a lamp for them on the winding way
Who did not rise in the hills at morning of sun-sight
Those who have not return to the tidings of
Those who now match as soldiers with no thumping feet
With smiles each we light for them a crystal bright teeth
Show them the way through to the eternal corridors
Mud spared to mend the eyes flooding shores
O passers-by buy their goods, so they can come back into today
Build the ant's hill and the earth, o children adore your dirt
Gather life in the eyes of passing strangers,
Throw a sunset on the river's dim
Bring the pouch another ounce of mud for the flaws
Mend the heart and its long wars
Make a haven beneath this milky, lullaby sky.
