BENAZIR BHUTTO IN THAT WITHOUT TIME TIME OF EVERNESS NOW

Tea time is a gathering of last night’s dreaming fragments of not where I have been but illuminations of where I am ever in that without time time of everness now. It is now pieces of dream as a tumultuous meeting clearly impromptu to announce a killing a murder the death of Benazir Bhutto rings of journalists concentric pressing in on an unidentifiable center to know more to know better to know inferences & implications of Miss Bhutto always Miss despite marriage she is pious with head cover she is Miss at this time dying in my pieces of dream. O Pakistan! In the outside circle by a pillar I am seeing. Across the rings yet as if nearby lethal powder I am seeing is tipped from a pencil-lead case minutely upon a cameraman’s shoulder I am seeing the act a tiny blue container a white secret otherwise gone unnoticed. For craving they are all still in a push. O information seekers! Shoving forth they to where no one stands to the empty as I fleeing at top speed run away away away afoot along a plaza vast & gray like Budapest by the Danube embankment without sun this time of October year. A college friend with baby carriage on an afternoon promenade stops me after years of no contact. No contact ignored. She is smiling she is clucking. About that girl shot that woman she calls a girl who was shot in Iowa which I had not known what was Miss Bhutto doing in Iowa? O Iowa! Running on breathless parallels grow with Commander Massoud I am seeing Commander always Commander & he is pious so clear-eyed with bearded chin I am seeing plots abound infiltrating the porous border between asleep & awake at 5:30 a.m. adrift then like refugees beyond reach.

(This dream-inspired prose poem is from 2001. Today, sadly, it is no longer a dream. O Pakistan! O world! O greed, anger and ignorance!)

Amy Hollowell