Lament for a Somali Herdsman

I had to write this in a Pastoral style for class. It's reflecting on a news article I read about some US bombings in rural Somalia.

Come, herdsman, chew khat with me
And tell me of your wedding.
The wind dances softly about your face
And sings a melody of your happiness.

Old man, I am joyful
For she takes me beyond myself;
I see myself, here, smiling
And I am complete.
I held her hands and their hennaed patterns spread to mine
Weaving me into her history,
Binding us together through our future
To care more for each other than ourselves.

I see her now
As the clouds loosen to display dusty stars;
She is sitting around the fire with the women
Whispering the words I said to her
On our wedding day:

Our life is harsh, my love,
I work all day in the bitter sun guarding our herd,
You travel miles to the market to sell milk and hides.
There are days when I feel desperate,
I feel I am sinking through rocky earth
With no will to fight my way out,
Yet you stand over me
With your love that softens and
Your love that strengthens,
You teach me about the love I feel for my family,
About the love I feel for my community,
About the love I must feel for myself.
We love so we dance, so we sing.
Because of you
I do not lose myself in the insanity of anger or revenge.

�Do you see the mystery of our pain?
That we bear poverty
And are able to sing and dream sweet things.�

The hole that sadness carves in me
Creates more space to fill with happiness;
With my family, my people,
To fill with you.
You are my joy.

An uneasy drone vibrates in the depths of their minds
And rises to fill the empty night,
Smothering the trees, the stars, every being
In a tremor of instinctive fear;
The camels run,
The children press white fingers into their ears.
The noise climaxes and
Leaves the earth in reverberating stillness.

A feral sound pierces the silence
Like discordant laughter
And from the prospect of a plane a pilot glimpses a figure bending over a body.

A paragraph an inch square at the corner of an English magazine reads:

�The United States carried out a
series of air strikes on the south
of Somalia this week. �Credible
intelligence� suggested that leading
al-Qa�eda operatives were hiding
there. Oxfam claims at least 70
nomadic herdsmen were killed.�

A wife bends over her husband.