Ducks in the Desert - a poem for my children

I woke up this morning and what did I hear?
But ducks quacking in the distance.
Ducks? In Amman?
In this semi desolate landscape where dwindling pine
And olives grow?
The snow was gone,
the sky was blue
And poor old Azraq and its oasis have
Obviously gone too.

The world has changed
Thinks me …
Ya fatheeyeh, mumbles hubby from a distance
Don't look so depressed.
The world has not changed
It remains the same
Despite the Budhha's edict
'Everything changes
And nothing remains'
…except people and their manias
Their intervention economics,
Their neoclassical monopolies
And one economies
Their lip service to development
While the key turns merrily the
Bank vault door on the majority poor.

And now the desert has succumbed to their policies in aid
Of the Washington Concensus;
No more sacred ground
Where the wild wind and shabbabeh tunes once blew;
But concrete walls and barbed wire fences
And this bit for you and this bit for them
And over there on yonder mountain base
A place where tourists can roam …
like cattle to the market
of development's case.

And I remember a land I once knew
A proud culture all embracing
Roaming, evolving
Heading forwarding,
Until the doors swung round
And in they poured with aid galore.
And before my eyes I saw a culture
Changing in an ancient land
As edicts caste from far and wide ….
From north and south descended
And the people stood and watched
With outcaste hands all flailing
Befuddled and bemused
And a crisis of identity impending.

So what now my children, I ponder
The one of my existence;
For you will never know, nor see
Nor feel the true one of my
Intrinsic reality … a love
Forlorn and forsaken
For a place, a distant memory
In the name of progress
Veiled in hype and heresy
For the sake of the one of the other
All business;

And hopefully
on the horizon
lots
more
snow.


J