John Popielaski
Cost of Living
Interest rates are rarely talked about
in poetry. The same goes for inflation.
Any economic benchmark really.
This makes sense to me. I’d rather read
a poem in which bats have made a comeback
and are dining on mosquitoes
as the summer night takes over, dotted
as it used to be by fireflies.
But I’m not living in a world
where bats are on the rebound from a syndrome
or where fireflies are numerous enough
that no good parent, lounging
on a patio in darkness, sees a problem
with allowing kids to bottle them for fun.
I’m living in a world
where Cyndi Lauper’s seventy-one
and where, as bad as things have gotten
in Khartoum, a place of astronomical
inflation, they are nowhere
near as bad, our envoy says,
as the trajectory suggests they’ll get.
I trust the envoy. I remember
sending money after seeing a fly
on the forehead of an Ethiopian boy
too weak to shoo the fly away.
I don’t believe I’ve seen a video imploring
money and compassion for Khartoum.
I’m searching. It is sad
that where the White Nile and the Blue
converge lived river hippos once,
and once there was a hippo goddess
worshipped by the ancients as a fierce
protector of the unborn and the young,
and once the Yellow Nile wasn’t
just a wadi in the desert to the west.
Other work by John Popielaski