"With the Maasai" by Heidi Seaborn

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present “With the Maasai” by Heidi Seaborn.  Seaborn started writing poetry in 2016 after spending three decades as a marketing executive. Since then, her work has appeared in over forty journals and anthologies including Nimrod, Penn Review, and American Journal of Poetry. 

Seaborn is a graduate of Stanford University and is on the editorial staff of The Adroit Journal.  She lives in Seattle.  Visit her at www.heidiseabornpoet.com.

With the Maasai

Heidi Seaborn

    ~Great Rift Valley Tanzania 1984

When the rains fail

"Drought" Ink on Paper
By J. Artemus Gordon

they fail again. Tanzania burns

dry. Ntimama curses the empty

sky. His beasts, just bones. 

Tanzania burns dry. Parched

plains diminish

beasts, just bones. The empty

sky steals grain, milk, meat,

flesh to bone. Cattle

wander with wildebeest

as Tanzania burns dry as stone.

Ntimama curses this land

water dried to mud, mud

dried to blood red. Rift

Valley, earth and gash.

Cattle, then children.

Small bones burned, dry.

Cursed, by this empty

sky, the gash of withered

earth, when the rains fail, and fail.

Poet’s Notes:  “With the Maasai” recounts a time I spent in Tanzania with the Maasai during a drought. I started the poem as a pantoum and then let it break apart to mimic how everything loses form under these harsh conditions. The poem is part of a series I wrote about my personal experience with natural disasters, war, and terrorism that I am collecting into a chapbook entitled, “Postcards from the Aftermath.”