Nothing But Static
Free-verse poem
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what do you do
when there are no more cards to play,
when there’s nothing left to say,
and no one to listen to?
when you can’t stare at the moon
because it’s the rainy season?
you get up, put the cards away,
blow out the lantern,
and turn off the radio
playing nothing but static.
what do you do
when you talk to fill the quiet,
when you’ve run out of words to try,
and there’s no one to talk to?
when you can’t ask the moon
because it’s the rainy season?
you get up and put the cards away,
blow out the lantern,
and turn off the radio —
it plays nothing but static.
what do you do
when you know nothing but static,
when you burn your brightest dreams
on the highest mountains of the moon?
let the cards blow away,
and the lantern burns out.
you forget about the radio —
it played nothing but static
and dance the forgotten dance of spoons,
a lonely waltz atop the ruined walls of broken rooms.
A note about the poem
Friends who read early drafts asked me about the source of the imagery in this poem. It’s basically nonfiction.
I wrote the bulk of the poem in 1998 while working on a chimpanzee project in the Semliki Valley Wildlife Reserve, located in western Uganda. The rainy season came late in 1998, and when it arrived, it made up for lost time.
(Read short prose pieces based on my time in Uganda here.)
Along with three Brits, I was one of four Westerners in the reserve. We each had a canvas tent, and we took our meals in a lean-to kitchen area built inside the ruins of a tourist hotel that burned in the…
