The Death of Hope

Though the shrieks come from my chest,
my ears not six inches from the wails,
I mumble prayers the screams will persist.
In America, if a dog had wasted away to this
there would be police and lawyers and activists shouting.
There is no shouting for the boy, no raised voice but his own.
Seven months of frail bones draped tightly by spotted skin,
marred by infections a sick mother could not heal
barely fill my arms. The boy’s shrunken chest
heaves with each pained wail,
the sound growing weaker with every passing minute.

The boy has a name, I’m sure,
but his mother could hardly push open the rusty iron gates
that squealed her arrival long after
the sun had set and the air begun to cool.
The nurses brought her in, each at arm’s length,
touching only as much of her as was necessary
to keep from dragging her feet on the rough stone floor
of the clinic. She collapsed in a bed,
legs and arms strewn about like so many of the
black-skinned men and women dotting stark white cots,
lining the clinic like a string of dominoes.
Each would fall before their time, like the mother,
who did not wake for water or to the cries of her child.

It has been four hours now,
and the boy has been given a name.
Tumaino, I call him. Hope in Swahili.
The nurses shake their heads. There is no hope here,
they say. Here is where the sinners come to die,
the ones who do not follow God’s will,
and keep their bodies for Him.
She is with Him now, I said, still cradling her son.
What sin has Tumaino committed, being born
to a woman in a country ravaged by AIDS,
where people are taught only to abstain, told that
condoms carry HIV, and only the wicked will be stricken?
Tumaino is not wicked, I tell them,
but I am ignored. America, they say,
has poisoned my mind. The medicine I have returned to share
is welcome, but not my thoughts of our God.