He’d planned on learning Italian in retirement
The honeymoon in Florence
Those state visits to Rome, his jokes
going over the head of the Pope
But when he downloaded Duolingo
there was some kind of glitch
--or maybe more user error--
and the only option left was Arabic
He found it to be an unforgiving language
He’d never been one for grammar
His throat resisted the fruitless torture
of medieval sense and sound:
mother, baby, widow, orphan
cold, hungry, shelter, corpse
arms, legs, siren, crater
oil, water, blood, burst
There’s more to life, he thought, than self-
improvement. He, who always slept
untroubled, now found himself waking
out of unfair dreams each night:
Oily arms
Bloody water
Hungry craters
Sirens sounding
Like orphans
With a sense of relief he resigned
himself to quitting after just two weeks
His golf game needed work
The Pope’s English was pretty good
He had no use for Arabic; no plans
to return to those ungrateful lands
which had turned a deaf collective ear
on all his efforts at teaching them
a better way of life
wooooo. nicely done.
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