Even though I have a very long association with USA and especially Miami, I have never considered living here nor was I forced to live here. That is, until Covid 19 arrived and the rest of the world was closed to me and I became a Covid refugee in Miami. It is insulting to use the term Refugee in my case, as it is to describe Miami Cubans who leave Cuba and call themselves Refugees. I apologize to the real refugees, such as the ones from Afghanistan coming now. In the last two years I did have a nice roof over my head, transportation and a wonderful group of indigenous people to work with.
I am grateful for what USA has given me, first and foremost, the gift of being able to work with the Indigenous people of this continent which they call the Turtle Island.
J and J who has sheltered me during this storm, with excellent Jamaican and British food.
My close friends, M and G whose company I enjoy every minute and it is always accompanied by gourmet dinners and excellent wines.
Come to think of it, I have made so many good friends in the USA..so many sister friends : Dar, Georgia, Sylvia, Michele, Wehnona, most of them indigenous who provided me with symbolic home and relationships. I was adopted as a brother by many of them.
Ian Burger and his loves, I do miss him, this great optometric public health person so devoted to Africa. So many faces began parading in the retina.. I am glad to have known them, drank a glass of wine with them, broken the bread with them. One of them was my travel companion for many years..From Lapland to San-land in Namibia.
Yes USA has given me hundreds of good friends.
Suddenly, I remembered, Pablo Neruda and Josie Bliss. I too had a Josie Bliss.
I was walking along the River Irrawaddy, now spelt Ayeyarwaddy, with my brother Eliyahu walking in front of me and I was reciting the poem Josie Bliss by Pablo Neruda with tears flowing downmy cheeks.
In one of my clinical rotations as a medical student, it was at Mount Sinai Hospital and I was assigned to read about a patient in the Medicine ward. I entered the designated room, saw a frail lady lying in bed , an IV tube stretching up the pole and a nurse, she also looked like a student, attending to the fluid bag.
She turns to me and said: At what speed do you want this IV to run, doctor?
A baffled and panicky look overtook my face and a fast beating heart. I gained composure and asked: Nurse, how many drops a minute do you think this lady would tolerate? She muttered some number to which I gladly agreed. She thanked me and left the room after making the adjustments.
Those were my revolutionary days, while I wore a shirt and white coat doing my duties as a Medical student, outside I would don a military jacket gifted to me, assuring me that it was worn by a left wing Portuguese general during the Angolan war? I was a pan africanist at that time, devouring the literature of that continent.
She would add up
my absent years
wrinkle by wrinkle, as they probably gathered
on her face from the grief I gave her;
because she was waiting for me on the other side of the world.
I never came, but in the empty
cups,
in the dead dining room,
maybe my silence wasted away,
my faraway footsteps,
and maybe until death she saw me
as if through water,
as if I were swimming in glass,
slow of movement,
and she couldn't take hold of me
and would lose me
every day, in the pale lagoon
on which her gaze was fixed.
Until she finally closed her eyes -
when was that?
Until time and death covered her over -
when was that?
Until hate and love bore her away -
where?
Until she who loved me in rage,
in blood, in revenge,
in jasmines,
couldn't go on talking to herself,
gazing at the lagoon of my absence.
Now, maybe,
she rests restlessly
in the great cemetery in Rangoon,
or maybe on the banks
of the Irrawaddy they burned her body
all afternoon, while
the river murmured
things that I might have said to her in tears.
I do not mind friends disappearing into the veils of absence for years on end, one after another
but difficult to reconcile the disappearance into the veil of oblivion.
THANK YOU UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
