College Poem Assignment #2

this one was just a free-write prompt of a poem up to 40 lines. "Mzungu" means white person in Uganda.

Sleep in Uganda

Stifling heat forced the mosquito net

Against my sweaty skin

The whirring fan stopped again.

No matter. It didn’t help, anyway,

Other than to muffle the sounds

Of the men at the mosque on the hill

Wailing into the night.

Sleep would not come,

Not yet.

My eyes closed

And their faces appeared again.

The darkest children I had ever seen

Marred by poverty and disease

And war and death and suffering,

Who smiled the brightest banana smiles

To the mzungu girl with a camera

That came to help them when they feared

No one ever would.

The faces of the rejected

Were etched into the backs of my eyelids.

The widow who purely needed a reason to hope...

The youth a promise of a future...

To simply believe

That there was more to the world

Than the stench of the slums

In which they live.

Sleep would not come,

Not yet.

I finally understood Pure and Faultless Religion:

“look after orphans and widows in their distress.”

And I realized that coming here

Was more than a photo opportunity.

It was the seed planted

That would ultimately transform my heart.

So that this mzungu girl must return

To this Godforsaken country

That inexplicably took my soul hostage

Through the smiles of orphans in Uganda.

And in making my decision to return again,

Sleep finally came.

© Jessica Baldwin

02.05.11