Natural Disaster

All day her hands measure the powder that will bloom and fade, bloom and fade,

while the same gray dust works into the creases of her knuckles, but will open red

above a square, the red she carries home in her skin. In the morning the voices climb

and braid into one rope of sound, thick enough to haul a body up by—

and for as long as the song lasts, no one's hunger is the only thing awake in them.

On every wall the posters, layer over layer, the paste still wet under the new ones,

so the Leader's face looks out from beneath the Leader's face, his cheeks the pink

of a health he hands down to them like grain, his eyes turned always toward a sun

that is rising just outside the frame. The women, row on row, sleeves pushed up,

their arms full of wheat they did not grow and will not eat, their faces lit from inside,

all of them looking the same direction, toward the morning the posters promise.

They pay her twelve mantou[1], still warm—

she counts them once, then lets them go, dries them, and sends them

North, to her mother, and her four sisters and brothers. What stays is the bag, which she

turns inside out, running her finger down the seam for the white dust the bread forgot,

then hot water over the crumbs, she calls it soup, and the calling makes it soup.

The street is full of people who have lain down and will not rise,

their open hands like empty bowls turned up to the sky. Her own hands are two such bowls—

she looks at them a long time. When will the morning come, the one they promised?

Chairman, my dearest, she says, tell me—you who are nearer to me than my own mother,

where have you put the morning? At home the wheat stood gold and tall above them,

shining all night like a field of small lamps, keeping watch over the people

who had lain down in it and would not rise. The grain went away from them,

cart after cart, the way water goes out of a field and does not come back.

No. It is worth it. Surely it is worth it—she waits for the words to warm her

the way they used to, and they do not. Tomorrow the sky will clear.

She turns the bag inside out again. Nothing. She says the blessing anyway,

quiet now, to no loudspeaker: no one nearer than the Chairman, no one nearer—

and hears, for the first time, how far that is.

It was a natural disaster, only that, only the weather, only the year being cruel.

She says it the way she says soup. It was nothing anyone did. A natural disaster.