Non-violence

                                                

I wander the shoreline
to where palm leaves clutter
the beach’s edge, the morning’s
fishing boats tethered like spent animals
to the dock. A ring of men
surround a trunk, coax coconuts
from the tree’s aerial womb
with the rusted blades of machetes,
slice each fruit’s meridian
to sell the milk. When I have returned
to the cool dark of my room
I think of that afternoon
in my childhood friend’s home,
after we’d force-fed her gerbils and
dug worm holes in the mud-streaked yard,
when her elder brother came
to me with a butcher’s knife,
forced me to sit on his lap
while he held the sharp edge
glittering to my throat, laughed
as I screamed. Perhaps he did not
want anything other than to
hold another body close—to feel
a beating alongside his own beating—
or perhaps he was just a boy learning
to coax a man’s power from the blade
where we are taught it rests.
I sat there through it all, on his knee,
above his groin,
as if on a turbulent boat
or balanced on the wave itself—
In the kitchen there was a smell of yeast.
The dog lay peaceful in her collar.
The trees on the quiet street released
their seeds. The ocean took
only what the shoreline gave.