National Geography Bee: Sign me up!
At the church we visited last weekend, two people got up and spoke vaguely about their ministry in a country in northeast Africa. For their safety, they couldn't say which one. Scary. On the drive home, my husband and I speculated which country it might be, and he said, "What's the one west of Egypt?"
"Uh...there's that little country, what's it called?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"I read about it in Runner's World. They profiled some elite runner from a tiny little country. Oh! Eritrea! Is that it?"
"No, west of Egypt. It's the one that America bombed back in the '80s."
"We bombed someplace in Africa in the '80s? I have no memory of that."
"Of course you don't. In the '80s you were sitting around writing poems about dirt."
"Hey! Those were good poems!"
"And before that, you were digging in the dirt that you were going to be writing poems about in the '80s."
"Yah, well, you can't remember the country, either."
I looked it up when we got home. It was Libya.
One of the poems was "Field Hands," and it won two prizes. So there.
3 Comments:
The poem, by the way, was indeed written in the '80s. The copyright was updated when I changed the line breaks.
isn't this the poem that ended up on the side of a bus?
Yes! The poem was one of twelve winners of the Poetry on the Buses contest. For the month of March of that year, a copy of "Field Hands" was mounted inside every city bus for passengers to ponder as they rode. My brother worked downtown, so I asked if he would snap a picture of it for me. He did manage to get a polaroid for me, but not without getting yelled at by the confused bus driver, "You wanna do what? Get a picture of what?" and the passengers, "Don't you take a picture of me!" What brotherly devotion!
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